


Cold Comfort

by skitzofreak



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Blood, Dreams, F/M, Hallucinations, Hand Kisses, Huddling For Warmth, Ilum, Imperialism, Pirates, Reflections on the devastating power of a quiet laugh, Spy Stuff, Stranded in the cold, Thief stuff, alternate universe - alternate first meeting, holiday Gift, injuries, space racism, survival stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-09-29 17:38:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 46,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17207900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skitzofreak/pseuds/skitzofreak
Summary: He pauses, watching her, and she knows in an instant that the flat, bored expression on his face is a mask. His eyes are far, far too sharp for someone who isn’t interested in what he sees, and when she catches his gaze, she sees him register her more clearly than any officer would ever look at a random cargo worker. He focuses on her face like he’s committing it to memory, obviously noting her set jaw, her defensive stance.The mix of terror and anticipation in her belly slips a few degrees farther towards terror.--An alternate meeting in a galaxy far, far away, between a desperate thief and an Imperial officer with something to hide, on a dying planet that takes no prisoners.





	1. The Job

**Author's Note:**

  * For [incognitajones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/incognitajones/gifts).



> _Prompt: I'll never tire of "what could have been" alternate SW-verse meetings for this ship. Other tropes I can't get enough of: hurt/comfort, stranded/snowed in together, huddling for warmth_
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> This prompt was so perfect for me I gasped out loud when I read it the first time. Alternate meetings between Jyn and Cassian in the Star Wars universe? Are you kidding me?! I live for that shit, I’ve written it so many different ways. The ‘preferred tropes’ are also some of my absolute complete favorites, and I never write the ‘not preferred’ tropes. Did…did you write this specific prompt and these specific caveats specifically for me, specifically? Did the mods just nod when they saw your entry and go ‘ah, yes, this one’s for Mel’ like noble and wise sages? Is it fate or chance, my friend, that has brought you to my door?
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> So anyway, once I calmed down a bit, I readied myself like a kid with a bowl full of Halloween candy, an iron stomach, and the willpower of gods. And I wrote you this. Happy Holiday season, incognitajones! Thank you for the excellent fic you’ve gifted us in the fandom, the supportive and lovely comments on people’s work, and of course, for this amazing prompt. Cheers!

It’s probably going to be a shit day. Jyn feels it even before she's fully awake this morning, her kyber crystal pendant sitting on her throat like a piece of ice against her pulse. She feels it before she pulls her patchy, stolen coat tight around her shivering shoulders, before the familiar pangs of hunger stab through her belly. It’s not currently raining, that’s a kriffing blessing, but the icy winds of Nar Shaddaa’s winter are whining through the narrow alleys and twisted streets, howling through the Whistlers set up on every rooftop to scare off bad spirits. (That’s bantha shit, of course; the Whistlers make it fucking impossible for sound scopes to pick up conversations from across the street. This is Nar Shaddaa, planet of thieves and smugglers and pirates, and no one’s believed in spirits around here for awhile, but they do believe in eavesdroppers.)

If Jyn had even remotely enough credits to get off this noisy, freezing rock, she’d have put her tail to it months ago. But she doesn’t, so she can’t, and today doesn’t look like it will be any different. Her last job ended here almost three months ago, and Jyn was paid a decent enough amount to keep her going. Or at least, she was _almost_ paid a decent amount, right before the rival gang to her current employer comes crashing in through the door and starts shooting. Her employer goes down like a sack of overripe pta fruit, and Jyn barely manages to avoid both the splatter and the blaster shots. She knocks one gangster in the teeth, steals another’s credit chip, and then blazes out of that place as fast her legs can carry her. When she cautiously checks back after the dust settles, exactly _no one_ who is in a position to pay her for her work is still alive.

So. That sucks.

Worse, it means that she has to find work again in a different part of the planet from the place she’d been painstakingly building a street rep. It was hard enough the first time around, when she was a scrawny-looking young Human, but at least she was clean and healthy. But the money that held her over the first time she set up shop is gone, the credit chip she stole in the gangster dust-up is barely enough to feed her if she’s careful with her meals, and frankly, she is looking a little worse for the wear these days. That makes getting new jobs harder than ever.

Today, she has a shot at fixing that. A new posting just went up, something that apparently has been offered in a lot of other sectors of the planet and then summarily rejected. Jobs like that make Jyn’s hair stand on end, and normally she would brush right by the posting. Some things just scream _it’s a_ _trap!_

But this is not ‘normally,’ is it? Her clothes are getting greyer and thinner all the time, and her face probably the same. So she snarls at the disapproving voice of her commander in the back of her head ( _ex_ -commander. _Ex._ She’s not beholden to anyone who went and dumped her almost four years ago, _fire and fuck_ , _girl, remember that? Definitely not my commander anymore)_ , and she goes to the meeting point on the job posting. It’s her best shot at work, credits, food. Maybe it will work out. Maybe today will turn everything around for her.

(But probably not.)

“He’s wiggled,” a Human voice is laughing when Jyn walks into the cantina. “Wiggled in his blue brain, sonny.” A large, burly Human male pushes himself up from a table in the back, shaking his shaggy head and holding his hands out palms down, a gesture that on Nar Shaddaa usually translates to ‘no, that deal is not good.’ Actually, it’s more like ‘by the many hells, that deal is stupid and insulting and you should be ashamed for even offering it.’ The big man turns and strides out of the door, almost knocking Jyn over as he thunders past, still laughing. “ _Wiggled_ ,” he says loudly and decisively one last time as he goes, and lets the door slam behind him.

The table where the big man had been sitting is occupied now by a smallish blue-skinned Rodian with a flaring red hood. The Rodian taps her multi-jointed finger digits on the table, and nods to another, larger Rodian standing behind her. The bigger Rodian hands her a datapad, and the blue one clearly crosses something off on the screen.

Jyn guesses this is the job, then. The one no one wants to take. The one that a large, muscled, armed pirate laughs at as too insane to be considered. Maybe it’s not so bad, though. If she goes into it knowing the score, knowing that it’s banthashit crazy, maybe she can avoid the worst of the flak? _Even the most obvious of traps is still a damn trap_ , Saw growls in her memory, the way he did when someone wanted him to try and grab Imperial supplies left out by the enemy to lure them closer. Now that she thinks about it, the argument in favor of grabbing the goods was pretty much always “but if we know it’s a trap, we can work around it!”

In Jyn’s general opinion, the whole point of a trap is to make the target feel safe enough to walk into it. But sometimes, when desperate, the reward starts feeling worth the risk. Like this Rodian and her ‘wiggled’ job. The amount of credits on the posting is…high. High for a ‘pick up and delivery’ run, and worse, there is even a ‘possible bonus’ noted in the description.

The small blue Rodian is still focused on the datapad, the bigger green one is occupied scanning the cantina as if checking for threats. He clocks Jyn quickly, and just as quickly dismisses her. She grimaces – she’s worn down to sharp cheekbones and shadowed eyes, and she’s short even for a Human (being underfed for half of her growing years hasn’t been helpful on that score). But she’s still heavily armed and she knows that she stands like a fighter. The Rodian should have at least marked her as a possible threat, even if he underestimated her ability.

She needs to get work.

Jyn takes a deep breath, marches her hungry, cold ass across the cantina, and sits down in the chair across from the Rodian like she owns it. “I want half up front.”

The Rodian doesn’t even look up at her (or at least, not that Jyn can tell, because without pupils it’s tough to pinpoint where the Rodian’s big blue eyes are actually looking). Her antennae swivel forward, however, quivering slightly. The big Rodian glares at her, his hands obviously sliding into his coat to rest on a pair of blasters. Jyn ignores him, despite all her instincts screaming at her to dive over the table and smash her truncheon into his throat before he can shoot her. Instead, Jyn keeps her gaze on the sitting Rodian.

A long moment passes, and then at last the Rodian lifts her head. Her antennae twitch slightly, and then she says, “A bold opening proposal.”

Or at least, this is what Jyn _thinks_ she says, but Rodian isn’t one of her studied languages, and her translator is an ancient piece of shit. What Jyn actually hears, crackling in her ear under the Rodian’s gravelly voice, is something more like _this is a proposition of audaciousness._ Jyn bites down on the inside of her cheek to keep her face stony and hopes that she didn’t accidentally just offer to solicit the Rodian for sex. That might explain the sour twist to the big Rodian’s snout, actually. There’s nothing to do but play it out, so Jyn shrugs and leans back in the chair, tapping one hand on top of the table idly while gently slipping her second hand beneath it.

“Lift both hands where I can see them,” the big Rodian snaps (she deduces that this is what he means from his tone, anyway, because the horrible translator actually crackles _erect all your digits and reveal them to me._ Shit, this translator needs a serious update).

For a moment she considers stubbornly keeping her hand below the table, because responding immediately might make her seem weak. But reason reinserts itself, and she brings her other hand up and sets it on the table in plain view. The big guy looks ready to gun her down, and anyway, she needs this job. She can’t afford to risk him calling her bluff.

“Your name, Potential Employee?” ( _Your assignation, Potential Being With Services For Sale?_ ), the first Rodian asks softly, antennae still swiveling gently around the cantina as if on constant alert. It’s a nervous tick in a Rodian, and combined with the big one’s tense, aggressive attitude, it tells Jyn…well, it tells her enough. They are not necessarily on the run, not if they are sitting in a relatively busy cantina in the open while advertising their location on a jobs board. But they are definitely not _comfortable_ sitting in the open with their location being advertised on a jobs board. Gangsters perhaps. Large scale smugglers. People with something to lose, at the least. And clearly, something important to gain.

Something they can’t get themselves.

Jyn clears her throat and works hard to pitch her voice a little lower. Rodians, like Humans, associate higher pitched voices with children, and - her barely twenty years notwithstanding - it’s been a long time since Jyn was a child. “You can call me Priya Hale,” she decides. It’s a name she never used as a Partisan, which has pretty much been her only criteria for pseudonyms in the past three years. Well, that and her real name. But she hasn’t used that in a long, long time. It doesn’t even bear thinking about. She’s not sure why she is, right now.

The small Rodian doesn’t seem to notice her sudden sullen confusion, nor the way Jyn’s hands clench into fists as she fights to banish the dark turn of her thoughts. “You may call me Gola,” the Rodian says, her own hands steady on the datapad in front of her as she gives a blatantly fake name. “The job is high risk, high reward.”

“Location,” Jyn demands briskly, and as low as she dares without sounding like she’s pulling a fake voice. “Time. Cargo. Payment.”

“Ilum. Urgently. Ten large crates. Half up front.” ( _The front half will be presented_ , Jyn’s stupid translator warbles). Her voice is just as brisk and professional as Jyn is striving to sound, although there is an edge of weariness to it. She’s waiting for Jyn to immediately reject the proposal, to laugh and stomp away.

And with good bloody reason. Jyn doesn’t know much about it, but she is aware that Ilum is an ice covered planet edging into the Unknown Regions. She can’t recall if anyone actually lives on that ice ball, but she does know that it’s crawling with Imperial military and they have some kind of big mining operation out that way. That explains why the Rodians can’t do this themselves – non-Humans stick out in exclusively Imperial spaces. But she doesn’t see how this is any different from any other job involving stealing from Imperials. People around Nar Shaddaa do this kind of shit all the time. Why hasn’t anyone signed on this job? “Transport for the crates?”

“There is a ship in place,” Gola replies instantly, though her antennae swivel to Jyn in surprise. “On Ilum’s surface. The coordinates will be given to you.”

Jyn glowers and folds her arms. “You’ve already got the cargo on a ship, but you can’t get the guy who loaded it to bring the ship back?”

A pause, during which the big Rodian glowers and Gola closes her eyes. When she opens them, they seem…sad. Maybe sad. Rodians are hard to read, and Jyn doesn’t have time to sympathize. “He no longer can.”

“So you’re stealing from the Empire,” Jyn interprets bluntly, and it’s dangerous to say aloud, but the way both of them flinch makes it worth it. She has to be sure they aren’t Imperial agents themselves. There aren’t many non-Human Imperials, but there are enough. Worth it to make sure these two aren’t going to grab her and drag her off to wherever her father –

“You mentioned a bonus,” Jyn asks abruptly. “On the jobs board. Possible bonus.”

The big Rodian’s dark eyes narrow, but Gola merely shifts her weight and nods. “Not necessarily a _bonus_. A requirement for the job, with extra pay if proven. You may not peek.” Jyn frowns and resists the urge to slap her kriffing ear and the kriffing translator, because apparently this piece of junk was programmed by a pervert. It takes her a frustrated moment to consider that it might actually be working, or at least, working reasonably, and the Rodian really did tell her not to _peek._ Peek at what? The ‘front half presented?’

Oh, wait. Right. She kind of wants to slap the side of her idiot head for a whole different reason now. “The cargo,” she clarifies out loud, watching her potential employer carefully. “You don’t want me to look at the cargo.” And now she knows why no one would take this job. A reasonable request from a normal job, perhaps, but when you were stealing from the Empire…

The Rodian spreads her hands palm up, drops them slightly, then raises them again to the initial height. Nar Shaddaa trader gesture for “do we have a deal?”

 _Walk away_ , Saw growls in her head.

 _This whole thing stinks of trap,_ she grudgingly agrees.

Outside, the wind howls and the Whistlers scream in response. Her thin coat sets poorly across her bony shoulders, and her stomach rumbles with hunger.

It’s a lot of credits.

And anyway…anyway, they hadn’t always been wrong, those Partisans who argued for getting the bait supplies. Sometimes knowing it was a trap gave them time to find the workaround.

Jyn reaches out her hands, careful not to let them tremble with fatigue, cold, or fear, and hovers them over Gola’s extended hands. “Done.”

 

* * *

 

The first half of the payment is more than enough to get her a decent meal, a heavier jacket, a rucksack big enough to fit some actual toiletries like soap and a toothcleanser, a clean set of underclothes, a pair of warm socks, and a dozen emergency food rations, packed tight into the bottom. She still has her blaster and five knives, plus a datapad, a digi-lockpick, and a truncheon. That’s enough gear to get the work done, she figures. The only missing puzzle piece is transport out to Ilum.

The answer is the _Muunyak,_ a slightly battered GR-75 scheduled to run a supply trip from Ord Mantell to Ilum in two days’ time. The big, lumbering freighter will take three days to cross what most smaller ships can do in roughly one day, but it is the only kind of ship going out to Ilum. Jyn suspects that it’s the only kind of ship allowed to fly around Ilum’s Imperial-controlled space. She has to bargain her way onto a public transport first (without a second glance back at Nar Shaddaa because good riddance to _that_ bad rubbish), and then smuggle herself aboard a bigger, more expensive passenger liner that eventually drops her off in the Ord Mantell commercial space port. And _then_ she has to convince the captain of the _Muunyak_ \- a Human female with sharp brown eyes - that she’s worth the investment to sign on as temp crew for the supply run to the Unknown Regions.

She just barely makes it in time, and it takes most of her up-front credits and all of her limited people skills, but when the supply freighter _Muunyak_ launches for Ilum, she’s standing at one of the viewports, her rucksack securely on her back, watching Ord Mantell’s curve fall away and then vanish into streaks of starlight.

Something large snarls at her from behind.

Jyn whirls to face a hulking creature covered in fluffy white fur, with four sets of unevenly sized eyes and a small curling proboscis jutting from it’s oddly pinched face. The creature raises it’s heavy paws, revealing wicked claws as long as her fingers. Jyn has a knife in one hand and her truncheon in the other before she’s finished taking in the sight – and then she realizes that the being is just standing, their paws raised, watching her. Another snarling noise from it’s seemingly unmoving mouth. She lowers the blade and truncheon to a more discreet angle at her side, but doesn’t holster them. “What?”

The being snarls again, the larger of it’s two sets of eyes narrowed near to slits, the smaller set blinking rapidly. She knows better than to apply Human facial cues to someone so clearly not Human, so she doesn’t take this as a scowl. It’s still unsettling, though, especially because the being towers over her, almost twice again her height.

“Calm down, rookie,” someone laughs from further in the cargo hold. “Never seen a Talz before?” The speaker is a Human female a few years older than Jyn, and several centimeters taller. She’s well-muscled, with bright blonde hair gathered in a high tail and a bar of some brass-colored metal jammed through her septum. Jyn sees work callouses on her broad hands, but nothing on her smooth knuckles, and no visible scars. For all those muscles, she’s not much of a fighter, this one. “He’s got big scratchers,” the Human raises her own hands in gnarled gestures, mimicking the Talz’ claws. “But he’s a coward, really.”

Jyn stares the strange woman down, unimpressed by the mockery in her tone and the sloppiness of her stance. The stranger clearly thinks she’s intimidating, because she’s rolled her jumpsuit to her waist to show off the definition in her arms, but she just as clearly doesn’t know the first thing about combat stance. In front of Jyn, the Talz snarls again, but now it sounds a little mournful. It – he – slowly lowers his claws.

The tall Human flips her blonde hair back and goes back to shunting packing crates from a loading pallet to a storage cart, something Jyn should be helping, probably. No one’s ordered her to do it, though, and she’s not worried about making a good impression on the captain. It’s not like Jyn’s going to get a work reference or a steady job out of this, since she’s going to jump ship in about three days and vanish from the _Muunyak’s_ records like smoke.  So instead, she reaches into her pack and pulls out her datapad, setting up the network to access the ship’s holonet server.

As she works, the Talz slumps off to the side and starts unloading another pallet, this one piled high with bigger crates than the Human’s load. Jyn takes a moment to do a more detailed check of her surroundings other than an automatic marking the exits and vents. Pallets fill the large cargo bay, and through a few open hangar-size doors she can see at least two other equally large hangar bays filled with similar boxes and crates. This is probably enough goods to feed a Star Destroyer for a week, or an Imperial outpost for a standard month. Jyn briefly considers the odds that she can fish anything useful out of this treasure trove of goods without being caught. The security tech on this rig looks decent, if a bit old. She can see a few other signs of disrepair too, corrosion on some of the piping, sloppy soldering seams on a nearby panel. It’s still a ship in decent shape – the Imps would never dream of hiring a disreputable-looking freighter for their precious supplies – but it’s not exactly high-end in here either.

Out of the corner of her eye, she catches the blonde scowling at the fluffy Talz as they work.

 _Talz_ , her datapad tells her at last. _A primitive species discovered during the Clone Wars. Homeworld: Alzoc III. Language: Talzzi._ _Classified: Sentient_.

And that’s it. No history of the species, no notable members, no links to their embassy on Coruscant or their own homeworld. She snorts as she does another quick search – their language doesn’t even show up as an official download for any translator software. She has to hunt around for almost ten minutes on a bootleg translation site to get a clumsy Talzzi program that will run on her translator. If the damn thing turns everything the Talz says into poorly-worded innuendo, Jyn’s going to toss it out the airlock and steal someone else’s.

The Talzzi program uploads painfully slow into the old translator, but at last, it works.

Jyn turns to the big white being unloading heavy crates like someone delicately sorting tea cups. “Priya,” she says bluntly, and waits.

The Talz looks at her, their proboscis curling slightly. Then they snarl. “Nothing,” her translator tells her. “I am nothing.”

“Nothing,” she repeats. “Your name is ‘nothing.’”

The Talz hesitates, then taps their chest. “I am walking of nothing,” they try again. “Male child of nothing is walking.”

Well, so much for that translator program. Unfortunately, it’s the only one she’s got, and a few words are better than meaningless growling noises. “No good,” she taps her ear, then shrugs to show that there’s nothing to be done about it. The Talz, possibly not as angry as he looks, makes a long chittering sound that might be a sigh. Jyn studies his body language for a moment. Frustration, slight weariness, but no aggression. No threat. (She eyes the long, curved talons and adds mentally, _for now_.)

“The stars are nothing,” the Talz says sadly, or at least, his large shoulders slump and his little curly proboscis retracts close to his chubby face. “The stars are of nothing.”

“The stars are still out there,” Jyn replies, cursing her stupid translator and the bootleg program and while she’s at it, the Empire’s lazy racism. She’s not even sure why she’s bothering to answer him. “Go find a viewport, you’ll see them just fine.”

“You done chattering, rookie?” The blonde has moved closer, holding a large crate on her shoulder with one arm and raising a sneering eyebrow at Jyn and her conversational companion. “Get to work.”

Jyn stares her down again, until the girl grunts in discomfort disguised as indifference and starts to turn away. “And your name?” Jyn snaps just before she turns, making the tall woman instinctively turn back, a little unbalanced by the cargo’s weight. The Human staggers but rights herself (more’s the pity) and jams a thumb at herself. “Dalle Siever,” she says, with far too much emphasis on the last name. She expects Jyn to recognize it, apparently. When it’s obvious that she doesn’t, the Human’s eyes narrow. “Siever,” she repeats. “As in, Captain Siever. Captain of the _Muunyak_. You know, rookie, the ship you were hired to _work_ on?”

Jyn takes a long time looking the belligerent Human up and down. “Captain Siever is shorter,” she says at last. “And quieter.”

“My _aunt_ , rookie,” the girl snaps, the crate on her shoulder wobbling dangerously as she loses her temper over Jyn’s failure to quiver before her. _Careless_ , _allowing her pride to override her caution,_ Saw shakes his head in Jyn’s memories. _Her weaknesses laid out before you so easily._

“And she won’t even let you on the bridge?” Jyn tilts her head, and make a show of looking the girl up and down. “How long she been stuck with you?”

It works even better than she expects, Siever’s face flooding with red like an alarm lighting up. She slings the crate to the ground with a startlingly loud thud. Over her shoulder, three of the nearest workers stop and glance up, and then all three make variations of the same grimace. Jyn knows that look – _here we go again_ , it says. Her stance and knuckles show otherwise, but apparently Siever likes to at least _think_ of herself as a fighter. Jyn slips a little back, her rucksack still sitting comfortably on her back, her weight distributed across the balls of her feet and up her spine. A familiar flare of terror and anticipation sparks up her spine and into her chest, her stomach tightening, her heart beginning to beat harder in her chest. Saw’s voice in her memory turns low, almost meditative. _Breathe. Watch the eyes. Wait_.

“An interesting crew, Captain Siever,” a new voice cuts in smoothly from the left. Jyn goes still, her eyes on Dalle Siever but her attention swinging toward the voice. The big blonde woman startles so badly that she practically shies to the side like a nervy pony.

“We get the work done, sir,” answers a Human that she does recognize, rough and a touch weary. Captain Siever. The captain sounds a bit more tense than she did when she hired Jyn, and there’s a slight growl of warning in her tone when she speaks to the big blonde hauler. “Lieutenant Willix, this is my niece, Dalle. A good hauler, even if she’s not much of a diplomat.” Jyn almost smirks; that warning isn’t even all that subtle. Sounds like the captain’s had to deal with her prickly niece before.

At her name, the blonde turns fully away from Jyn to stare at the newcomers, which allows Jyn room to sidle back a step – a faint brush of warmth and fur at her back makes her pause, but the Talz is merely standing behind her, looking over her head at the speakers. Jyn turns in time to see the captain standing with her hands clasped behind her back in a formal position, and at her side…

“A pleasure,” says the Imperial officer, his voice mild and his face bored.

“The lieutenant works for the Department of Xenodetic Survey,” the captain is telling her niece in a tone only just shy of urgent. Jyn takes a long look at the man and decides that he does look like the sort of guy who probably works at the DOX. That particular department is ostensibly responsible for making maps of Imperial space and little more, but every fool knows that there is power in the control of information, and mapmakers control the trade routes. This one looks like exactly the sort of stuffy, smug _shuutta_ who knows that he can erase your entire homeworld with the flick of a stylus on his datapad. He’s a little taller and leaner than the average Human male, his dark hair slicked back and his neat goatee cut into meticulous perfection. The goatee throws her a little – Imperial officers are allowed to have facial hair within certain regulations, but it’s generally considered unfashionable. But the rest of his appearance, from his crisp uniform to his cold, dark eyes, is the picture of the Imperial ideal.

Or at least, that’s what she thinks right up until he turns from his detached study of the big blonde to look at Jyn. She means to duck her head and stare at his boots, she knows better than to meet an Imp officer’s eyes, she _knows_ – but her blood is still up in anticipation of the fight, her heart still racing, and she instinctively raises her chin and stares right back at him.

He pauses, watching her, and she knows in an instant that the flat, bored expression on his face is a mask. His eyes are far, far too sharp for someone who isn’t interested in what he sees, and when she catches his gaze, she sees him register her more clearly than any officer would ever look at a random cargo worker. He focuses on her face like he’s committing it to memory, obviously noting her set jaw, her defensive stance.

The mix of terror and anticipation in her belly slips a few degrees farther towards terror.

The Talz shifts his weight, his big fluffy body bumping into Jyn’s shoulder blades, and for the first time since she found herself in an abandoned bunker on Tamsye Prime, Jyn is relieved to have someone standing behind her. The officer flicks his gaze up to the Talz, his eyebrow twitching slightly before he catches it, then back to her face. Jyn grits her teeth and stares him down. Her heart is hammering now, _get out!_ bellows Saw in the back of her head, but it’s too late. He’s caught her. Whoever he is, whatever he wants – she’s caught.

And then…

And then his eyes go flat, empty, uninterested. The kind of eyes she would expect to see in a bored Imperial officer surrounded by unimportant civilians in a grunt job. Because she’s watching so closely, Jyn can practically see the moment he makes the choice, the moment he deliberately closes himself entirely off. The moment he dismisses her from his attention. He doesn’t look away, but now when he meets her eyes, it’s like he’s…a complete stranger.

Wait. That’s stupid. He _is_ a complete stranger. That’s exactly how he should be looking at her, if he looks at all.

“We should be prepped for launch in an hour, sir,” Captain Siever says, and Jyn jolts back into reality with the realization that all of… _whatever_ that was, it’s all happened in less than a few seconds. He had seen her, taken her measure, and dismissed her (or hidden from her) before the captain had finished speaking. “Is there anything else you care to see before I escort you to your cabin?”

The Imperial makes a vague gesture of ambivalent agreement. “Is there anything else you care to show me?”

He has, Jyn realizes, an accent. He’s hiding it, or at least muting it down so that it’s less noticeably different from the preferred Coruscanti tone, but it’s definitely there. A Mid-Rim accent of some kind. Perhaps that explains the goatee, the fashions of the less important regiments more relaxed than the Core World military preferences. It doesn’t explain the eyes, but, well, she doesn’t want to think about the explanations for that.

Every instinct screams at her to get off this ship and run as far and fast as she can.

Which is... nowhere, isn’t it? She has no creds, no references, no backup, nowhere to go. She needs this job. And anyway – she takes a deep breath as the captain and the Imperial walk away, vanishing down the corridor at the far end of the loading bay – anyway, it’s only a three day trip to Ilum, and the _Muunyak_ is a large ship. She will ride the first supply shuttle down to the surface, and then vanish into the snow. The stashed ship she’s meant to pick up is only a day or so travel outside the main mining base, and if she’s smart and careful, she can blast out of that system within ten minutes of finding it.

Jyn takes a breath to slow her heart, and deliberately dismisses the Imperial. She can avoid him, and focus on the work at hand.

And the Talz. Should probably focus on that, too.

Jyn turns and steps smoothly away in one motion, tilting her head back to look up at the fluffy white Talz looming behind her. The big man lets her go, his larger eyes squinting a little in the harsh florescent light of the cargo bay, the smaller set staying calmly on her face. Night vision, she realizes. The bigger eyes are better for darkness, the smaller more suited to the light. She wonders if the Talz gets headaches a lot, and then reminds herself that she doesn’t care. She has problems of her own.

“Okay,” she tells the big man. “Back to work, then.”

The Talz warbles at her. Her translator takes a moment to hum in her ear, and then spits out, “The man of darkness/shadows sees. He is in probability not unkindness of.”

“Right,” Jyn rolls her eyes. She really, really needs a new translator. If – when – she finishes this job and gets her paycheck, she will have to set aside a little bit of the payout for it. “Goodbye,” she tells the Talz firmly.

“Lunch is of the juice,” he replies.

“I’m sure it is, fluff” she shrugs, and walks away as fast as she can without looking like she’s fleeing. “I’m sure it is.”

 

* * *

 

Jyn has learned how to be nothing and no-one, to be totally inconsequential to everyone around her. It hasn’t been an easy lesson over the last four years since Saw dumped her, but by fire and fuck, she’s _learned_ it. It helps to remind herself that she actually is nothing and no-one to anyone alive, that everyone who ever might have given a damn are long dead or gone.

Which is why it’s so fucking jarring to find herself the center of not one, not two, but _three_ different people’s attention, all at once. The blonde arsehole from the cargo bay seems to have settled on Jyn as her new personal archnemesis, and every time Jyn walks into the cargo bay, any cargo bay, there she is, glowering. So far, all she’s done is make loud, rude comments about Jyn to the other haulers, and throw heavy crates around like she’s trying to make a statement. As intimidation tactics go, it’s pretty weak, and from the way most of the other haulers simply grunt or shrug when she snarls something about Jyn’s scrawny limbs or hollow cheeks or ragged clothes, this is apparently not a new thing with her. Jyn keeps one eye on the posing cargo hauler anyway, just in case, but otherwise doesn’t bother to react. Let her sling the heaviest crates around as she likes. Less work for the rest of them. It’s only annoying that Jyn can’t walk into a room without the blonde immediately making it known to everyone within a twenty meter radius.

The Talz, unfortunately, is even worse than the hauler. Every time she turns around, her vision fills with downy white fur. Jyn doesn’t dare eat in the galley with the rest of the crew, and the _Muunyak_ is just large enough that she can get away with grabbing her meals and slipping off to eat in some dim, quiet corner without anyone commenting. Which should mean that she gets to eat in peace…except he follows her out, carrying large piles of proteins and strange chopped fruits and something that resembles insta-bread, all piled in his arms with a small bouquet of bright blue flowers perched on the very top. The first day, she watches from the corner of her eye with wary curiosity when he crouches on the floor near her bench in the back of the smallest cargo bay. She’s done a little careful holonet search, and learned that Talz don’t have teeth. Is he going to lick all that food until it’s gone? How long does a meal take for him?

The Talz plucks the blue flowers off the top of his pile with long sharp claws with delicate precision, and then dumps the rest of it into Jyn’s startled lap. “Hunger is eyes,” he says – or at least, that’s what her translator hears. Jyn recovers her wits and shoves the food to the side, on the bench. She glowers at the Talz, because this needs to end right now, before the fool gets any ideas. “Hey,” she says flatly. “Fuck off.”

The Talz tilts his head, and then lifts the blue flower to his fluffy face. Jyn narrows her eyes at the Talz’s neck, lets her lip curl back at the corner into a snarl, and draws herself in tense and ready to spring forward. She knows that she looks threatening and dangerous, a predator ready to tear his throat out.

The Talz uncurls his proboscis and delicately sips from the blue flower, his large night-vision eyes blinking slowly and happily in the dim light of her little corner.

“We are not friends,” Jyn snarls.

“Lunch is of the juice,” he burbles, pointing at the pile of fruits by her hip.

Jyn shifts her glare from the Talz to the pile.

It’s a lot of food.

She doesn’t touch it until the big man finishes his flower, stands up and waves his curved claws at her in what is probably meant as a friendly gesture, and then clumps away down the corridor. A few bits of white fluff float in the air where he had been crouching, and Jyn waits until they settle on the floor and she can hear nothing but the hum of the distant engines. Then she scoops the food up and stuffs it into her pack, which is never far from her side when she’s not working the crates.

The next meal, when the Talz follows her out to her hiding spot with another bounty of food, she doesn’t bother to growl at him. “No stars,” he tells her when she attempts to ignore him instead. “No stars.” Some stupid glitch in the translator makes the words come through softer than normal, and his large night vision eyes blink at her wetly in the dim light.

“The stars are still out there,” she finds herself saying, not nearly as coldly as she intends. Her lack of vitriol irritates her, but the Talz doesn’t speak again, so neither does she.  By the third meal, she chooses simply to give a brief nod when he drops a small bounty of breads and fruits next to her. He clearly doesn’t understand when she tells him to fuck off, so Jyn gives up and accepts that she has acquired a large, furry shadow. A shadow that speaks in gibberish (as far as she can tell) and obviously thinks she’s too skinny to be healthy. She’s been too hungry these last few weeks to really protest that last one. As long as he doesn’t push it, and none of the rest of the crew say anything about it, she can deal with this. There are worse things than an oblivious fool feeding her.

Worse things, like an Imperial officer who is just… _fucking everywhere_.

Jyn tries to avoid him by staying in the cargo bay the first day, because what the hells would a mapmaker be doing in the cargo hold of a commercial hauler? He’s probably only on this ship to begin with because he has to alter all the maps of the space routes around Ilum. He should be sitting in his quarters deciding which planets the Empire wanted to wipe from known space, or following the captain around demanding to be entertained by someone in his social class. And yet, not an hour after the Talz first tries to feed her half the galley’s worth of food, Jyn turns the corner of a stack of crates and finds herself nearly face to face with the rigid grey uniform and the detached man wearing it. She instinctively slides back a step and settles her weight on her toes, her fists halfway up into a defensive stance before she catches herself and forces them back down. Too late, though, she can see his eyes flick from her hands back to her face, though his expression doesn’t change at all.

“Priya Hale,” he says, and she’s so unbalanced that for a moment she doesn’t recognize the name. And then her brain kicks in, she slumps her shoulders down, drops her eyes to somewhere around his collarbone, and shrugs. _Just another cargo hauling shmuck_ , she thinks, hard. _Just some honest fool trying to make a living. Beneath your notice._

She must not think it hard enough, though, because the Imperial doesn’t move or snap some pretentious order at her. Instead, he folds his hands behind his back and watches her quietly, as if he’s waiting for something. Waiting her out.

She grits her teeth and resolves to wait right back. He’s got a knife in his left boot, a blaster on his belt, and if she’s not wrong, there’s another smaller concealed blaster tucked in his right boot, too. Surprisingly heavily armed, for a mapmaker who likely spends all his time in offices and on slow-moving transports flying along the major trade routes.

She can feel him returning her covert scrutiny with his own, and wonders if he’s good enough to pick out the knives strapped to each of her wrists beneath her baggy sleeves, or the vibroblade secreted under her thin coat. If he does, he makes no indication of it. They stand in silence for a long moment, and when Jyn risks glancing up at his face through her eyelashes, he catches her eye immediately and tilts his head a little to the side, an unspoken question _. Are you really going to play it like this?_

For a moment, she considers staring at him dumbly, maybe even with her mouth a little open, stunned and stupid. It’s a valid strategy, worked for her dozens of times before. Even if he thinks she’s faking, he can never prove it, and over time he’ll get too frustrated to keep trying. Besides, it’s genuinely stupid to change tactics mid-way through an interrogation, so Jyn’s determined to stick with it. But then he has the gall, the sheer nerve, to flick an eyebrow up, the tiny change somehow shifting his entire expression from blank reserve to mockery, and the heat flares in her blood, restless and snarling. She narrows her eyes and slips back another step. “Yeah, and?”

Shit, she shouldn’t sound so defensive and cranky. Should have just said _yes sir, sure am, that’s me, and uh, so sorry sir, didn’t catch your name?_ The lapse in judgment shouldn’t matter, but this guy is too…too attentive. Too observant. Too smart. The eyebrow smooths out, but he somehow still looks a little too smug to be completely detached. He’s scored a point against her, and they both know it. Even if Jyn doesn’t quite know what the game is, yet. “You appear as a very new hire in the ship’s registers,” the Imp says next, conversational, friendly.

Jyn shrugs. Of course he would have access to the ship roster. Probably has access to all the _Muunyak’s_ files, and more. He’s probing, and probably trying to prep her. If she starts answering the easy, pointless questions, she’ll be that much likelier to continue answering the harder, more dangerous follow-on questions. But Saw Gerrera taught her every interrogation technique in known space, and she’s not going down that easy, dark eyes and pleasant face be damned.

“So new, yet you already have some friends onboard, from what I saw earlier. Were you a cargo hauler before the _Muunyak?_ ” The Imperial’s tone makes it clear that he already knows the answer to that question, and Jyn’s heart suddenly begins to pound in her chest. For a brief, terrible moment, she is eight years old and curled in the corner of a bouncing shuttle, the stink of the cave still on her clammy skin and clothes. The big man who was supposed to rescue them all looms over her, his eyes dark, his voice rough. He rests a huge hand on her thin shoulder, and she flinches but it doesn’t hurt. He’s warm, and gentle. _What is your name?_

 _Jyn Erso,_ she whispers, but he’s already shaking his head, his hand steady on her shoulder, the only point of warmth in all the universe.

 _Not anymore_ , the big man says. _You must shed who you were, and become someone anew, and then do so again, and again until your days are ended. It is the only way you will survive, my child. The only way you will live._

“I worked docks,” Jyn says now, because Priya Hale has some references from various docking stations around Nar Shaddaa. This Imperial is looking at her like he’s looking for Jyn Erso, but she can give him only Priya Hale. Priya Hale is nobody, just some dock worker trying to get by. Priya Hale is safe.

“I see,” the Imperial looks down, and Jyn quickly shuffles her feet out of the defensive stance that she had once again moved into when he started talking to her. Shit. She’s really off her game right now. And it’s only the _first_ day of the job. She needs to stop screwing around and get her head on straight. This is likely only the first Imperial she will see on this job, and if she blows it here, she’s dead. Or worse.

No sooner has she finished telling herself this when the Imp throws another curve at her. “You know much about Ilum?”

“Cold,” she grunts at him, struggling to keep the stupid look on her face while her voice gets harsher and less patient.

The Imperial’s thin lips twitch slightly, a smile caught and forced back. “Something of an understatement, I think.”

Jyn shrugs again. It’s the only reaction she trusts herself to give right now. His eyes are really just…way too sharp. Too knowing. She’s full of shit, and he has her marked. “Well, I suppose you’ll become familiar with it soon enough,” he says, the corner of his mouth still a little quirked. “I recommend a thicker coat.”

She has to get out of this situation. Not that she’s entirely sure what the hells this situation even is, but she needs to disengage and regroup, somewhere he can’t see her. “You been there before?” She blurts out, and then hastily (and only a tiny bit grudgingly) tacks on a “sir” to the end of the question.

The Imperial shrugs. Jyn waits a beat, but no, that’s all she’s going to get from him. He isn’t quite smiling at her, but she can see the shadow of it around the corners of his mouth again. He’s definitely mocking her now. It makes the heat in her blood swirl a little higher, nearly drowning out the gravelly warnings of Saw in the back of her head. _Dangerous, my Jyn, so dangerous. Attack or disengage. Do not give him room to maneuver._

“Your coat doesn’t seem so thick, yourself,” she grumbles.

“I have others.”

He sounds far too relaxed, not trying to be her friend but still inviting conversation, and like a fool she falls into the trap. “Bring your whole wardrobe, then?”

She just about to kick herself for speaking so informally to a damn Imperial officer when she catches it – the flicker of discomfort across his face. She’s hit some kind of nerve, spoken some truth he wasn’t expecting. “No,” he says flatly, and meets her eyes again and grimaces. Jyn slowly quirks an eyebrow at him, the tables now flipped. She’s seen him nervous, uncertain, and more importantly – caught out in a lie. And they both know it. Imperial officers make a damn good wage, and even one given to traveling for his work would have plenty of clothing. But that twitch – she’s seen it before, from the kind of people that she lives with, down in the dirt and the desperation. An Imperial officer in a prestigious department like the DOX would never know what it was like to carry his whole wardrobe on his back.

But Willix did. If that was his name. It’s highly possible that Jyn’s not the only one pulling a con job on this ship. Maybe that’s why he honed in on her so quickly. Maybe that’s why he has so many weapons tucked into his crisp Imperial uniform.

She’s two seconds away from doing something probably really stupid when a new voice breaks through the silence of the cargo hold. “Hey rookie, quit bothering the officer and get the hell back to work.”

Dalle Siever strides around the cargo stacks just as the Imperial steps slightly to the side, smoothly making room without appearing to concede any ground at all. The woman stomps in between them, passes straight by the man, and comes to loom over Jyn. It’s such a clumsy show of blatant sucking up that Jyn nearly rolls her eyes openly. The big woman is definitely trying to impress the Imp by being so aggressively on his “side” against Jyn that its almost painfully awkward.

But it’s also the perfect chance to escape, so instead of putting the girl down, Jyn merely nods and flashes what she hopes looks like a nervous smile. “Yeah,” she says, backing away. “Yeah, of course. Sorry, sir.”

She spins on her heel and darts around the crates, letting her footsteps clatter loudly until she’s sure they can’t hear any more. Then she pauses, takes a deep breath, and slinks silently back around the stacked cargo until she can hear the Imperial’s low voice again. At first she can’t quite pick up the words, which makes it all the more easy to notice that he does, in fact, have a very distinct accent. It’s a little thicker now than it was earlier, even. Before she can guess at what that means, she finally slips in close enough to hear what he is actually saying to Captain Siever’s niece.

“ – imagine you have done well for yourself in the rings,” he’s saying, and Siever makes some noise of proud acknowledgement. “But let me tell you, Dalle,” and he sounds almost friendly. “If you try to fight her, that woman will tear you to shreds.”

Siever gives an incredulous snorting laugh, and Jyn blinks a little in her shadowy hiding spot. Is he talking about _her?_ Shit. _Shit._ He definitely saw her go into a defensive stance, and he knew what it meant. Bantha balls and shit. She needs to avoid this Imperial for the rest of the job, no question.

“No offense, Lieutenant Willix,” Siever’s voice cuts into Jyn’s thoughts with the jovial condescension of someone who has never stared death in the face. “That bag of skin and bird bones couldn’t bend my pinkie back, you know? Even if I weren’t an experienced fighter and –“

Her voice cuts off abruptly, and Jyn wonders what stopped her speaking. She doesn’t hear any movement, so he must have just looked at her, or perhaps held up a hand. “You are an experienced prize fighter,” he says, mild emphasis on the word ‘prize.’ “That means that you have fought for pleasure, for money, for status.” His voice drops suddenly, and Jyn has to lean against the crates and strain to hear his next words. In a low, intent voice that cuts straight up Jyn’s spine and buries itself between her shoulder blades, he says, “That woman out there? People like her, they fight for one thing only. _Survival_. If you take a swing at her, you will intend to knock her flat, maybe black her eye. Teach her a little lesson, perhaps. But the moment she marks you as a threat at all, Dalle, she will assume it is a fight to the death. She will tear you to pieces in seconds, out of instinct. I strongly recommend,” his voice raises again, pleasant and neutral, the accent fading back to bland and formless, “you find another target.”

A pause, then the sound of boots clicking against the scuffed cargo hold floor, fading back towards the ladderwells to the upper decks. It occurs to her that he might try the same trick she just pulled, so Jyn slinks away for real this time, towards the larger cargo bays where a skeleton crew is shifting inventory, double checking the loadout and the paperwork. She can slide through and pretend to have been there all along, giving her a solid alibi should anyone come looking. She spends the next few hours running through the coordinates to the ship she’s meant to pick up on Ilum, and planning excuses to duck away if she sees Seiver, the Talz, or worst of all, Lieutenant Willix.

Which does her _zero_ good, because he’s sitting in the galley when she enters it next, eating quietly off to the side with the captain and the bridge crew. He’s in the corridors between the crew bunks and the upper decks. He’s constantly, constantly strolling through the cargo bays. And to make it all worse, he neither stops to speak with her again nor pretends he doesn’t see her. Every time she sees him, he locks eyes with her and gives just the smallest of nods. Every time, she finds herself wanting to nod back. Or worse – smile.

By the third day of the blonde Siever posturing over her, the Talz dumping food in her lap and asking if the stars are gone, and the Imperial officer looking at her like they shared some secret between them…Jyn is about ready to scream. Fortunately, the _Muunyak_ snaps out of hyperspace an hour after the last mid-meal, and Jyn is one of the first to report to the cargo bays for shuttle loading. It’s not necessarily backbreaking work – the _Muunyak_ is well-off enough to afford a few older-model auto-loaders, and all their hover platforms are in acceptable working order. But the Imperials want their supply shipment quickly, and the haulers are rushing madly throughout the cargo holds, shoving crates into the shuttles. Jyn has to dodge several near-hits from hover platforms being shoved along too fast, and at one point, some idiot nearly drops a stack of heavy food crates on her head. She dives for the deck and clears the wreckage at the last moment, waves off the concerned foreman and ignores the startled apologies of the clumsy hauler. Her knees are bruised from the fall, her back aches from the work, and her patience is already at the fragile limits. She is so…so fucking ready to be done with this job.

So when the foreman yells out for volunteers on the first shuttle run to the surface, Jyn nearly throws an elbow into another hauler, she’s so eager to get her hand in the air.

“Right, Hale, then,” the foremen shouts, jabbing a finger at her and then marking something on her datapad. “Onboard, you’re first shift for offload on the surface.” The woman pauses and scowls down at Jyn over the edge of the datapad at one point. “You got cold weather gear?”

Jyn hesitates, but if she runs back to the lockers to grab gear, she might miss the first wave of shuttles down. “I’m good,” she calls back, and jerks her head towards her pack to imply that she’s carrying it inside. She isn’t, of course, it’s all her worldly belongings that she isn’t wearing on her body right now. But it’s enough to satisfy the foreman, who turns away with a brusque gesture towards the shuttle door.

Jyn strides in, relief and anticipation churning within her belly.

There are five people already inside the small bridge of the shuttle, standing slightly too close together for comfort but forced into proximity by the packed cargo crates filling the rest of the small craft. The first two are cargo haulers like herself, two Humans she’s never spoken to and has no intention of learning their names. The third is, _oh wonderful_ , the big blonde Dalle Siever, her smug expression of assumed command fading into a sneer as she registers Jyn's presence. _Sorry,_ Jyn thinks with a flush of her own irritation. _Didn’t mean to ruin your fun_.

The fourth person in the shuttle is the Talz, because of course it is. The big man turns and spots her, his daytime eyes squishing into what she’s almost certain is a sort of Talz-smile. As he moves, he reveals the fifth and final traveler on the shuttle, and Jyn isn’t sure if she wants to laugh or snarl or just curse the universe into a thousand pieces.

“Priya Hale,” the Imperial officer says mildly.

“Lieutenant Willix,” she snaps back at him, thoroughly unimpressed by the machinations of fate that have brought her to this point.

The Imp takes in her ragged clothes, her pack humped on her back. “Not much of a coat, hauler.”

“Looks like you brought enough to go round, lieutenant,” she nods to the overlarge pack resting by his boots.

“Shut it, rookie,” Siever steps between them, her scowl fierce – and a touch uncertain. She clearly doesn’t like the new hire and the Imperial officer being on speaking terms at all. Jyn almost wants to reassure her – _it’s not that we are friends, we are just both full of bantha shit and we’ve caught each other out._

But all she says aloud is, “We leaving yet?”

“Two minutes,” one of the other haulers calls from the console, plopping himself down in the ripped up pilot chair and tucking an old headset over his ears. “Then it’s twenty to atmo, and ten more to land. Probably five hours to empty the shuttle, and then back for second shift drop off. You’ll be cleared to depart as soon as doors open, Lieutenant.”

“Yes,” Willix agrees, still watching Jyn across the cramped space with eyes that are far too sharp. “I know.”

“Stars,” the Talz rumbles, pointing out the shuttle’s viewscreen as the cargo bay airlock pulls open before them. “The nothing of the stars between are walking.”

“Stars are still there, fluff,” Jyn tells him absently, watching as the blueish white curve of Ilum appears in the void of space before them.

“So are the Destroyers,” one of the other haulers mutters under her breath, and Jyn leans around the Talz to see two familiar, dreaded shapes hovering just outside the atmosphere of the planet below. A horrible thought occurs to her just as the gravlocks release, and the shuttle rumbles for a moment before the engines catch and it glides out of the cargo bay into the darkness.

“The shuttle is headed for the surface, right?” Jyn looks around at the rest of the crew, carefully ignoring the Imperial officer. “We’re for the surface?”

Despite her best efforts not to include him in her question, it’s the Imp who answers. “For the mining base, Hale,” he says quietly, and if she didn’t know any better, she would think his tone is meant to be soothing. “This load is for the supplies.”

“You don’t want to check in with the area commanders, sir?” Dalle asks in what is probably meant to be a pleasant, appeasing voice and merely comes off sycophantic. "We can divert to the Destroyers if you do."

“No need,” the lieutenant answers smoothly, and this time, he’s the one who makes a point of not meeting Jyn’s eyes. “My business is on the surface, for now.”

“Shuttle One Seven Four, underway,” the hauler at the controls says into the mic, and turns the thrusters towards the surface. “Zip up, gentle beings,” he adds to the cabin at large. “Going to be a long, cold day.”

She’ll have to steal something warmer from the base, Jyn decides, crossing her arms tightly and bracing against the rocking of the shuttle as it nears the planet’s atmosphere. She only needs to get a day’s travel by speeder or shuttle across the surface – speeder would definitely be better, a shuttle will only draw attention – and then she can get to this hidden ship, and get the hells out of this system. As far from bullying haulers and overly friendly aliens and dark, watchful eyes as she could possibly get.

The shuttle jolts as they cross into the atmosphere, and the gravity drive whines as it transitions from zero-g to planetary pull. The viewscreen crystallizes around the edges as the heaters compete with the cold and wet of the outside air, and it takes a moment for the viewscreen to clear. When it does, Jyn’s stomach drops into her boots, and she finds herself reaching up blindly for her collar, scrambling for the small crystal that sits in the hollow of her throat.

The majority of the surface is an unrelieved white, an expanse of featureless nothing that stretches on and on to the distant curve of the horizon. Somewhere to the south, a massive snowstorm is churning along the plains, moving sluggishly away from the shuttle’s trajectory. All the white nothingness makes a perfect canvas for the single blemish on the otherwise smooth surface - a massive, irregular hole slagged into the side of the planet, glowing red and black with magma. Along one ugly edge, the red hot magma flows sluggishly along the white plains before cooling to a blackened river. It looks like…it looks like…

A wound, she thinks, her hand tight around the crystal and her muscles quivering with a tension she doesn’t quite understand. The hole is so large that the third Star Destroyer she’s seen in the last few minutes is dwarfed by it, only a sliver of incongruous white against the pulsing red and black of the mined out hole. The Imperials didn’t come to Ilum and start carving what they wanted out of it’s crust. They blasted the whole planet open like an egg, like a ribcage, and started ripping out the guts fistful by greedy fistful.

She doesn’t know why it bothers her, but it does.

The crystal is painful in her grip, the edges digging into her flesh, but she doesn’t let go.

“They killed the whole planet,” Siever says in a stunned voice from Jyn’s side. Shouldn’t say that out loud. Not when an Imp might hear. Not when anyone might hear. Such a kid, still, despite her size.

“A shame,” an accented voice murmurs from nearby, probably one of the haulers, although she can’t remember which of them had that thick Mid-Rim accent. Wasn’t it the woman? Doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Why is she surprised that the Imperials would wound a planet like this, just to get what they wanted? She’s already seen the other kinds of wounds they are perfectly willing to inflict. What’s one more?

She shakes herself, hard, and tucks the crystal back into her shirt collar before anyone can see it. Never mind. She’s got work to do. Somewhere down there is a ship hidden in the snow, and she needs to be on it by tonight. There’s not a damn thing she can do about a hole in a planet, and there never will be.

 _This is how you will survive_ , Saw reminds her. _This is the only way you live_.

“Incoming ships,” the hauler at the controls says, “Probably escorts from the base. We’re about fifteen out, yet.”  Jyn blinks because his accent is definitely Outer Territories, not Mid-Rim at all, but before she can reconcile his voice to the one that spoke a moment ago, something whistles past the viewscreen, bright red and flashing.

Jyn’s conscious mind registers it a moment after her instincts do, because by the time she thinks _blast bolt!_ her body is already turning away, diving towards the deck. It’s a stupid thing to do, the floor isn’t going to be any safer, but there’s nowhere else to go and nothing else to do but dive, and she hits the deck plating just as the hauler at the controls bellows, “What in the actual fuck is – “

The second bolt slams into the viewport and explodes the plas-glass inward, cutting the hauler’s scream short and sending a hail of burning hot shards across Jyn’s shoulders and arms as she throws them over her head. The world tilts sideways, the hum of engines devoured by the roar of the wind crashing through the broken viewscreen, and something heavy lands on Jyn’s back, knocking all the air from her lungs. She gasps and kicks out, but the world is spinning now, out of control and falling down, down, _fuck we’ve been shot down!_ and there’s a hand in hers, Human, scrabbling for purchase and Jyn latches down tight on it. It’s not enough to anchor either of them, and she feels herself falling away from the deck, or the deck falling away from her, suspended in the churning air inside the dropping shuttle. Dead, she’s dead, it’s all over, and none of it even mattered –

Something hard and furry wraps around her waist, hauling her in close, and her grip brings the other Human with her to the side of the shuttle. The Talz keens over her head, high and terrified, and reaches out his other arm to latch around the Imperial. Then he turns and slams Jyn and the Imperial into the wall, his big furry body pinning them both in place as the world crashes, screams, and then at last, slams into stillness around them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, of course there is more, this was just already 10k words long and I figured we needed a break. I don't want to flood out the tag, so the other two parts will be posted over the next couple days. Happy New Year!
> 
> Some story notes: [Ilum](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ilum) is a canon place in Star Wars, sacred to the Jedi Order as a place for padawans to face themselves and gather their kyber crystals for their lightsabers. It was rich in kyber and completely barren of anything else. After the Empire rose to power (and technically, slightly before), the planet was slagged as an expedient means of gathering as much of the crystals in it's heart as possible. 
> 
> I tried to make the [Talz](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Talz) as un-Chewbacca-like as I could, because, well, we have certain mindsets about the tall, hairy members of the galaxy far, far away. Mindsets which I feel would be echoed in the Imperial worldview, sadly. They've got a hell of a tragic story, themselves, and I'm a bit sorry to be making it worse with the bad translator. It's got it's purpose, though. Bear with me.
> 
> I made up the _Muunyak_ and the crew, and I've never been a cargo hauler so I'm making up how that would all work as I go. Forgive me any errors in that regards.


	2. The Officer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part 2 - sorry it's a bit late, had a family holiday thing run long, and didn't get the chance to do my typical neurotic last-minute editing. Hope there's nothing too egregious in this. If there is, let me know!
> 
> Happy Almost New Year, incognitajones!

She can’t breathe. The darkness crushes down on her, her ribs creaking under the pressure of the nothingness, pain spiking up her back and shoulders to where her head is pinned at an uncomfortable angle. She can’t see. She can’t breathe. The little light in her hands flickers and flickers and _please don’t go out don’t leave me in the dark no no no_ –

And then the weight shifts off her, the pained tension in her back releasing as the pressure lifts, and air so cold it burns comes rushing into her nose and mouth. Jyn wheezes, thrashing out instinctively as she fights her way to her feet, blinking in the odd red-tinged light. Something overhead blocks her from jumping to her feet, so she rolls hard to the side and pushes herself up. Her disoriented brain struggles to understand her surroundings. Fire all around, twisted glowing metal walls, sparking wires swinging wildly around her head, something big moving just to her left, something hard tangled around her right hand – white light! A sliver of bright daylight pouring through a gash in the blazing wall. Jyn lunges for the light, light means _out,_ out of the fire and the sparking wires and the crushing darkness. Distantly, she recognizes the sensation of the weight on her back – something heavy had been covering her, pinning her down. Gone now, don’t stop, get _out!_

She makes it two steps before the thing tangled around her right hand brings her up short. Jyn whirls, chest heaving as she fights to get enough of the too-hot air into her aching lungs, and looks down to see a Human hand clutching at hers. The Imperial is clinging to her hand, but his head is turned away, not looking at her. He’s leaning up against the shuttle wall like he’s been thrown there, clutching at one of the pipes in a desperate attempt to stay upright. He doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s holding her back, his long fingers as tight as iron bands around hers.

Jyn tenses to wrench her hand free, but then she instinctively follows his eyeline, and sees the Talz, on his hands and knees with a pile of broken crates and spilled equipment tumbling over his broad back. His white fur is beginning to blacken and singe where the metal touches him, and all four of his eyes are closed tight against the acrid white smoke beginning to billow out from the twisted console. Beyond him, she can just make out two vaguely Human shapes amid the wreckage, unmoving. 

The Imperial turns his head to her, his eyes wide. He looks at her, then down at their joined hands as if he’s just as surprised as she is to find them linked. She sees his face harden with some sudden resolve, and he lets go. “ _Out,_ ” he shouts at her, jerking his chin towards the white light behind, and then he pushes himself off the wall, stumbling towards the pinned Talz.

The gash is ten, maybe twelve steps away from her. Cold air pours through, forcing the flames to hiss and spew up a small cloud of red sparks. _Retreat and regroup,_ Saw’s voice bellow in her memories. _Leave the dead to theirs, lest you share in it_.

Jyn snarls, and plunges back into the shuttle, following the increasingly hazy shape of the Imperial as he rams his shoulder into the crates piled haphazardly on top of the Talz. A few pieces of what looks like mining equipment parts and varying bits of unidentifiable metal clatter to the deck, but the majority of the pile barely shifts. Willix backs up, and rams into it again, grunting as his shoulder smacks into the heavy pile. This time the crates slide to the side, one balancing precariously on the edge. The Talz warbles something high and frightened. Jyn’s translator crackles in her ear, but gives no attempted translation. The air is getting harder to breathe, the stinging white smoke beginning to billow in earnest from the damaged console. The two still forms of the other Human haulers are now lost in the cloud of toxic smoke, and the Talz shudders under the rubble, his head jerking away as the cloud curls around his face. Willix backs up again, lowering his shoulder.

Jyn launches herself forward just as he begins to surge towards the pile again, and her shoulder hits the pile only a few hand-spans away from his own. The pile tilts sideways, then crashes down in a cascade of ringing metal. The Talz groans, his arms wobbling as he is suddenly relieved of his crushing burden. Jyn reaches down to grab his hairy shoulder, sees the Imperial move to the side to grab the other, and together they heave the staggering Talz to his feet. As the big man loops an arm around her shoulders, Jyn dimly recognizes the weight of him as the weight that had been crushing her down into darkness, and only now realizes that the darkness had been warm and breathing, not the cold damp of a cave deep in the hillsides, and the flickering lights had been fire, not a dying lantern that faded into the scary nothing of a life she doesn’t yet understand -

Fuck. She cannot do this right now. She needs to get _out._

To her shame, the Imperial officer is already ahead of her, dragging their unstable trio towards the gash in the wall. Or ceiling, apparently. Looks like the shuttle landed on it’s side, and what she thought was the bulkhead was actually the top of the spacecraft. Willix herds the Talz through it, and Jyn does her best to keep the giant Talz balanced across her much lower shoulders.

The cold air hits her like a hammer blow to the sternum, her muscles seizing up and her lungs and throat aching as the air goes from too hot to too cold in a heartbeat. Willix keeps walking the Talz, and by extension Jyn, forward into the snow for another several feet before he finally lets them stumble to a halt. The Talz drops to the snow on his knees, nearly taking Jyn down with him. She manages to get out from under his arm in time, and finds herself standing ankle-deep in snow, staring over the Talz’s back at the panting Imperial officer. Willix meets her eyes, and then breaks into a fit of coughing, leaning over and bracing his hands on his knees. He hacks for so long that for a moment Jyn thinks he’s going to vomit, or maybe pass out, but then he gets control of himself again, and spits to the side. The spit is blackened with soot, but seems at least free of blood. In fact, unless he’s hiding something significant, it appears that both of them are surprisingly free of injury. Cuts, bruises, and that’s definitely a mild burn on his cheekbone, but otherwise, they are moving and breathing well enough.

The Talz, on the other hand – Jyn glances down and finds herself staring at a mess of purplish ooze spattered across the white fur. Blood, it’s the Talz’s blood, pouring sluggishly from several long gashes on his back. Jyn reaches out instinctively, then hesitates when she realizes she has nothing to offer, nothing that will close those ugly wounds or offer any aid.

“We need to get out of the open,” Willix grates in a hoarse voice, and Jyn’s head snaps back up, and finally her senses seem to wake the hells up entirely and she takes in the full reality of their situation. The shuttle burns with billowing white smoke to their side. The Talz is awake but bleeding. The Imperial is hunched over with his hands on his knees, looking battered and unsteady. And overhead, what she had mistaken for the echo of the shuttle crash in her head turns out to be the scream of at least three TIE fighters that she can see, ripping across the sky in pursuit of…some small craft she can’t identify. Small, silvery, not any shape she knows. Not Imperial. Not Hutt ships. Shit, they aren’t even those old fighter craft that the Rebel Alliance favors.

A hand closes around Jyn’s upper arm, and if she weren’t partially buried in the snow, she would have turned and struck him across the face. But the snow catches at her feet and sends her nearly crashing down face first. She flails for balance instead of attacking. Willix staggers as she knocks into him, and Jyn finds herself with her face nearly pressed into his shoulder, clinging to him like some sort of child. Disgusted at herself, she struggles upright immediately and glares at him, ripping her arms from his grip.

“Over there,” is all he says in response, pointing in the distance. Jyn squints, fighting to ignore the shriek of fighter engines overhead, or the distant whine of heavy guns firing. It’s both easier and harder than she expects, to filter and compartmentalize while battle rages around her. Four years, she thinks quietly in the back of her mind, but it seems the war hasn’t really left her. Maybe it never will.

Several red bolts fly through the cloud layer overhead, and a small ship blooms into a red flower of fire before fading into black smoke and silence. Jyn refocuses.

About two hundred meters away from the shuttle crash, she can just make out something dark and irregular in the sloping white snow. Cave entrance, she thinks blurrily. If they are lucky. Still going to be murderously cold, but at least she won’t be standing in a white field, a massive target on her back.

She leans back down and grabs the Talz’s arm, tugging him upright. “Come on, fluff,” she grunts. “We’re moving.”

He moans softly in her ear, his shaggy head swaying, his little proboscis in such a tight little curl she can barely see it.

Willix moves to the other side, and sidles under the Talz’s other arm. The take a step forward, then another, but up close Jyn can see that the Talz is struggling to stay awake now, and the fur on his back feels matted and damp against her arm. The side that is pressed against the Talz feels warm, but her other side, exposed to the cold with only her thin coat to protect her, feels like handfuls of ice are being scrubbed against her. She shivers violently, and the small motion almost sends all three of them crashing down. Shit. A third step, a fourth, _shit_ , they are never going to get all the way to the cave.

She could leave them. The thought whispers through her mind as they push another two painfully slow steps ahead, listening to the whine of blasters overhead. She could run ahead, maybe make it to the cave. Her thin pack is still on her back. If she moves fast and doesn’t stop long enough to freeze up, she can maybe make it to the hidden ship.

Even as she’s thinking it, she turns her head to peer around the Talz’s heaving chest, and finds the Imperial looking at her with dark eyes. His face is grim, a light sheen of sweat slicking his forehead, with the beginnings of a large bruise smattered along his sharp jawline.

He’s thinking the same thing. She can see it, in that instant, as clearly as if he had spoken it aloud. The moment their eyes meet, his jaw tightens and his mouth turns down at the corners, and something dark and unpleasant flashes through his eyes. She thinks she might recognize it, despite how quickly he turns his head away. Anger. Fear.

Shame.

He’s going to leave them behind.

Jyn think about the blades hidden under her jacket, but knows in her heart that she won’t send them flying into his back if he runs. She…understands. Damn her to all the hells, she _understands_.

“Well,” she snarls loudly. “Go on th-then.” To her shame, her voice hitches as a violent shiver seizes her body.

Willix doesn’t turn back to face her, but his eyes slide closed for a moment.

“Go on, _Lieutenant_ ,” Jyn tries to keep the bite in her voice, but she shivers again and it gives her voice a humiliating wobble. “Save your sk- skin.”

“The emptiness among the stars is vast,” the Talz murmurs between them.

“Stars are st- still there, fluff,” Jyn replies, almost automatically, and huddles a little closer to his meager warmth. “Shut up a-and walk.”

“Cannot,” the Talz wheezes and starts to tip forward. Jyn braces hard against it, and she can feel the Imperial trying to brace from his side, too. But it’s not enough. “Cannot,” groans the Talz, and plunges forward into the snow. Jyn loses her footing and watches with helpless rage as the white rushes up to smash the frozen snow into her face.

Something jerks her to a halt, a few inches from the crusted icy surface. Jyn blinks, then twists to look back over her shoulder, ignoring the twinge in her neck as she does.

“Hey, rookie,” Dalle Siever grunts at her, blonde hair hanging in greasy tangled strands around her grime-smeared face. “Quit lying down on the job.” Then she heaves, yanking Jyn back up to her feet and tossing her to the side. She leans down and grabs the Talz by the shoulders, the straining muscles in her arms visible even through the thick coat she has somehow acquired, and pulls the Talz upright. Dark purple blood smears across her orange coat sleeve and covers her black gloves, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

The Imperial is kneeling awkwardly in the snow on the other side, and as the Talz’s body moves out of Jyn’s eyeline, she can see him shivering almost as hard as she is. Those grey uniforms are neat, precise, and utterly useless in extreme temperatures. His face is turning an unhealthy red where the viciously cold air bites into it, and she knows from the unpleasant numbing sensation in her own skin that she probably looks about the same. They aren’t going to survive long enough to abandon one another, at this rate.

“Where we going?” Dalle calls out over the roar of the fighters, tugging the Talz more firmly into place across her broad shoulders. “’Cause I figure we can’t stay here, yeah?” As if to emphasize the point, one of the silvery ships swoops low and screams by nearly overhead, kicking up a spray of snow that hits Jyn’s face like tiny blades. It passes overhead the burning shuttle and then pulls sharply up, vanishing out of sight through the clouds, but still audible. The whine of blasters, red flashes in the clouds, the vague threatening shape of a TIE in close pursuit, and then Jyn wrenches her attention back to the surface, where she has a lot more immediate problems.

“Cave,” Willix yells, pointing towards the horizon. “Get Waxna to the cave! I’ll catch up!”

 _Sure you will_ , Jyn thinks, and then blinks as the Imperial turns without looking at her back towards the burning shuttle. Dalle doesn’t bother to wait around, she simply plows ahead through the snow, churning the icy chunks under her heavy boots, half dragging the Talz at her side. Jyn hesitates a moment longer, but the sudden absence of the Talz’s warmth against her side sends her into another round of shivers, and she grimaces as she realizes she can no longer feel her toes. She can’t stand here in the open and the cold. She ought to follow the Talz and the hauler, and then slip off towards the ship coordinates.

She turns towards the shuttle and clumsily crashes back through the broken trail of snow after the Imperial.

Willix sees her closing in on him and pauses by the gash in the ceiling of the shuttle, watching her with shuttered eyes as she steps in close, her arms tight around her waist and her teeth clenched against the shivers. “Supplies,” he grits at her, struggling to keep his own teeth from chattering together, too. Jyn nods and waits for him to walk in first, but he enters the shuttle without hesitation, either not noticing or deliberately ignoring her suspicious glare. Disgruntled at his lack of caution around her – she’s shivering, but she’s still dangerous and he should _know_ that, the bastard – Jyn follows close behind. The fire has already died down in the cabin, the heat dying away much faster than it would anywhere but in a frozen wasteland like Ilum’s surface. The white smoke is still billowing from the console, but Willix drops to his hands and knees and awkwardly crawls under the rising smoke to grab at something partially buried by the crates. It turns out to be his overstuffed pack, looking worse for the wear but serviceable. Jyn sees him glance back over his shoulder at her, and then lean a little farther, reaching for something she can’t see in the clouds of smoke. If he breathes in any more of that electrical fire smoke, he’s going to pass out from the toxicity.

Not that she cares. Jyn turns her back on him and bends low, picking her way through the rubble towards the spilled crates. The first one is full of junk, just some random machine parts that are worthless to her right now. She tries not to let the desperation – or the cold – eat into her mind as she shoves that crate clumsily aside and roots through the next splintered hunk of metal. Food rations – okay, that’s something. She grabs a handful with shaking fingers and stuffs them into her small pack. The next crate sends a bolt of pure relief through her chest. Cold weather gear, mostly gloves, thick socks and boots. No coats or thermal gear, but shit, this is way better than what she has. Jyn hastily grabs a few pairs of socks, two pairs of gloves and one set of boots. She shovels all but the boots and one set of gloves into her pack, and hopes that will be enough. She can’t sit around and switch boots in here, but once she’s clear of the smoke…

“Here.” A hand thrusts into her view, holding a blaster.

Jyn turns on her heel, dropping the boots and gloves as she swings out at the source of the weapon. Willix jerks back just in time to avoid the blow to his face, and the blaster clatters to the deck with her discarded gear. “It’s for you!” He shouts, hands up and palms out in submission. “No threat, Hale. No threat.”

Jyn sucks in a deep breath, immediately regrets it as the smoke lingering in this part of the cabin stings her throat. She can still see a second blaster in Willix’s hand, but it’s hanging harmlessly from his finger instead of pointed at her. The other one is lying on the deck by her fallen boots, safety still on. Okay. Okay. He’s giving that one to her. No threat.

Wait. He’s _giving_ her a blaster? A weapon?

 _Trap_ , Saw growls in her head. _Kill him now, before he springs it._

Jyn shakes her head. “Why?”

Willix shrugs, keeping his hands raised and his blaster rendered safe. He opens his mouth as if to say something, then closes it.

The smoke is stinging her eyes now, too, so Jyn grits her teeth and tells herself that she has no real choice. A weapon is a weapon. She swoops down and grabs the blaster, refusing to flinch as the cold plas-steel touches her skin. She shoves the weapon into her belt and pulls the gloves on as quickly as she can manage, watching carefully from the corner of her eye as Willix nods and turns away, dropping his arms. He doesn’t spin back around and fire at her, doesn’t even watch as she pulls the blaster out and inspects it for any traps or flaws that might make it explode in her hand. Nothing that she can see – in fact, it seems like a reasonably high-end weapon, Imperial made but with modifications that she doesn’t really recognize but can tell aren’t detrimental to the blaster.

She snatches the boots and makes for the opening. This will have to do, and the longer they linger here, the more likely whoever shot them down will show up and finish the job.

“Wait,” Willix croaks at her through the smoke, and despite herself, Jyn turns back to look at him. “Communicator,” he says, gesturing towards the console. “I can –“ he stops, hacks again, this time shaking his head as he fights the smoke creeping into his lungs. “Can call for pick up,” he grunts at last.

Jyn looks over his shoulder at the console. “We’ll never ri-rip it out of there in time.” Damn it all, she’s still shivering, and the cold wind gusting through the gash behind her isn’t helping. Her feet are still going numb and her throat aching from smoke, too. Not a good sign.

“Got to try. Won’t – won’t last out there without – “

He cuts off, his eyes going wide, and Jyn feels the shift in the wind against her back a moment too late.

_Wham!_

Something slams into the back of her head, and Jyn feels the world drop out from under her feet before the ground rushes up to bash into her face. Shouts overhead, the scream of a blaster shot, the crash of something heavy falling to the ground. _Up! Get up! Death takes the slow!_

Jyn rolls to the side and scrambles to her hands and knees. A body lies in an unnatural heap in the gash leading outside, a Weequay bundled in a thick coat. She can just see the thin smoking hole in his startled face, right between the eyes. A precise blaster shot, that.

To the side, Willix curses in a language she doesn’t recognize, then shouts. “ _Pirates!_ ”

That’s all he has the chance to say before another humanoid shape bursts around the pile of toppled crates and smashes into the small of his back. They go down in a tangle of limbs, and Jyn forces herself up to her knees, her heart throbbing, her head aching. The attacker scrabbling at Willix’s face with clawed fingers is another Weequay, but the pirate who comes bounding in from the outside over the body of his dead comrade is Human. Jyn spins on her knees, lashing out with her fist at the newcomer’s groin. Her knuckles land solidly between his legs, and the Human gives a low pained grunt as he doubles over. Jyn forces herself to roll up to her feet, ignoring the ripping pain in her muscles and the tightness in her chest. The air by the opening is less smoky than the rest of the ship, but it still burns to breathe. No time, can’t worry about it, poison is a problem for the future. Right now, Jyn surges forward and slams her elbow into the Human attacker’s nose, sending him flying back outside with a sickening crack and the feel of brittle bones crunching against her arm. The Human vanishes out into the snow, and Jyn pulls her blaster and shoots blindly through the opening. Her first shot is answered by a scream, which her second shot cuts off with a gurgle.

Behind her, Willix flips the Weequay and lashes out with a series of lightening fast, furious punches, each landing with a dull _thwack_ against the pirate’s face. The Weequay screeches and something glints in his hand, arcing towards Willix’s face. The Imperial catches the man’s wrist, stopping the long-bladed knife mere millimeters from his eye, but the defensive move forces him to let go of the pin. As Jyn turns, she sees the Weequay claw at Willix’s face with his free hand, and the Imperial twists away with his eyes closed, snarling as three thin lines of red blood lay open his cheek. They are too close together and struggling too hard to risk firing the blaster again, so Jyn snaps it back into her belt and runs forward. Her own vibroblade slips into her palm like an old friend, and for the first time since she stepped on this shuttle, she feels a brief moment of calm settle over her. This, she can handle. This she knows how to _do_.

She slides to her knees and brings her virbroblade down in a smooth arc, feeling the blade slip into the pirate’s eye with only a whisper of resistance. A gurgle, then silence.

Jyn looks up and finds her face less than a handspan from Willix’s, his panting breath crushing across her cheek, his eyes wide.

“Thank you,” he says at last, and his voice is…different. That accent that she picked up before, on the _Muunyak_ – it’s definitely more pronounced now, and somehow it seems to transform him from Imperial officer to...someone else. Someone who would drag a non-Human from a burning ship, someone who would look at a world murdered by the Empire and call it a shame.  

Jyn shakes herself. The smoke is eating into her brain now, she can tell. They need to get out of here. She needs to get away from his face.

“Coat,” he calls as she turns and stomps back towards the opening, and Jyn stops just long enough to wrestle the thick jacket from the first Weequay attacker, the one who punched her in the back of the head. Fucker. It’s too big, a clunky thing in faded grey, but its infinitely preferable to nothing, so she shrugs it on and tries to pull it tight against her. She steps out of the gash to check on the Human pirate, and finds with satisfaction that he’s lying sprawled about a meter from the opening with two neat holes in his chest. His coat it ruined, and he doesn’t seem to have anything else of value on him save a cheap blaster and a crowbar. Jyn resists the urge to kick him, and then realizes with an exasperated sigh that she’s forgotten the boots back inside the burning shuttle. Her eyes and throat sting at the thought of walking through that smoke again, and her stomach twists with queasy anticipation, but her current boots are running thin in the soles. She needs the winter gear.

Willix drops the boots and gloves into the snow next to her. Jyn twists to look up at him, blinking back an unexpected wave of nausea as she does. That smoke must have really gotten to her, but she’s distracted from that thought by the sight in front of her. Willix has pulled a heavy blue parka over his uniform, a fur-lined hood framing his narrow face, and his bulky pack is firmly on his back. “Come on, Hale,” he says under the distant roar of fighters. “Before the second landing party touches down.”

Right. No way these three were the sole pirates at the party, especially not if they were bold enough to steal Imperial supplies right under the noses of three Destroyers. Who the fuck would even have the sheer guts to –

Not important. Jyn yanks on the boots and gloves, holding her breath as the cold air hits her exposed feet in between boots, and then strides out into the snow towards the distant cave. Or tries to, anyway. Her feet feel swollen and tender, her insides poisoned from the smoke, and her brain addled from…everything, so instead of a decisive march towards her goal, she finds herself instead limping and stumbling forward, her toes catching on every frozen ridge and burble in the snowscape.

“Look,” Willix calls, his voice still hoarse from the smoke but his accent clearer than ever. A rustling sound, and she turns in time to see him yanking a crumpled tarp half-covered in snow away from a lumpy grey object half buried in the snow. He reaches down and poked at something she can’t quite see, and then a dull coughing rumble filters through the snow towards her. Willix frowns and pulls at something else, and then a speeder bike shudders and rises clumsily through the thin layer of snow that buried it. It wobbles a few centimeters over the ground. Willix tugs the handlebars, shakes his head when it tilts dangerously far towards him – definitely more than the stability coil should have allowed – but then he climbs stiffly onto the seat and revs it once, twice.

Jyn glances up at the sky, but the cloud cover is dropping ever lower, and she can’t see the dogfight that she can still hear raging overhead. Maybe the pirates’ ship was nearby too? But she can’t see it from here, and the chill in her bones combined with the throbbing pain in her head make her disinclined to hunt around in the snow for it. Besides, she doesn’t know how to fly a fighter, and if she somehow manages to take off in a pirate’s ship with TIE fighters all around, she’ll just get shot down for her trouble. The speeder, and the man on it, look to be her best option at the moment.

Willix drives the sputtering speeder to her side and holds out his arm without a word. Pretty fucking presumptuous of him, even if she is between a rock and a cold place. He’s still wearing an Imperial uniform under that blue coat, and whatever he’s really up to out here, it can’t be good for Jyn in any way. For a moment, she considers smacking his hand away and telling him to kriff back off to whatever shithole he came from – but when she snarls up at his face she sees…

Forced calm poorly masking uncertainty. Fear. Fury.

And lurking underneath it, a terrible, bone-deep exhaustion.

If he tries to kill her out here in the snow, she will break his neck and leave him to the ice.

The thought is oddly comforting, a trickle of something warm running down the back of her neck. Her feet and hands are still numb, but at least some of the shivering has subsided. That’s…probably a good thing. Fuck, she hopes it’s a good thing.

Before she can think about it too much, Jyn swings up behind him and loops her arms around his waist. She feels him stiffen against her, and then relax. He leans back slightly, allowing her time to get a better grip on him, and sends the speeder whistling forward. It isn’t very fast, the engine skipping every so often, and the hover jets don’t lift them as far from the surface of the snow as they should. Damage from the crash, perhaps, or else it’s just an older, poorly maintained model. The wind is still relatively mild, but every gust sends icy knives digging into her body, and her hands and feet are now disturbingly numb.  The only source of warmth in all the world is the body in front of her. She finds herself leaning into him, and isn’t surprised when he leans back with a sigh she can feel all through her arms, her ribs, her thighs.

Jyn doesn’t think about it.

By the time they make it to the cave, the sound of fighters has almost completely faded away. The pirates giving up and running, perhaps, or the Empire simply cutting it’s loses. Jyn’s also stumbling even harder than she should be, her limbs heavy as stone, her lungs straining against the cold. She’s so, so fucking tired, and her head feels like iron. Frozen iron.

“Well,” Willix says suddenly over the wind and the dull cough of the speeder engine. “That’s…different.”

It’s a monumental effort, but Jyn lifts her head and sees –

Oh. Fuck.

“Creepy,” she manages through a dry throat, and Willix sighs again. Part of her wants to flinch back from the sensation of his body pressing against her inner thighs and arms, part of her, embarrassingly, wants to cling tighter. She resists both impulses, and the second he stops the speeder outside the narrow cave opening, she throws herself off. Her movements are stilted and painful, but she manages to stagger past the frozen sides of the cave opening. The cave is apparently mostly underground, with the opening merely a fragment of iced-over stone jutting from the otherwise smooth landscape. There used to be intricate carvings of some kind around the cave opening, but time and weather have worn them into indecipherable lumps and formless shapes, and the ice has frozen over them in disturbing shapes. The wind, or the direction of the snow fall, or something else she doesn’t understand, has poked holes in a semi-regular pattern throughout the heavy ice coat. The end result is what appears to be a row of uneven, screaming faces clustered around the entrance.

For some reason, Jyn thinks of the slagged hole in the side of the planet, where the Imperials are ripping whatever mineral they mine here from the dying world. In that light, it seems fitting that she would find the world itself screaming in agony.

Doesn’t mean she wants to look at it, though, and both she and Willix hustle a little faster past the empty eyes of the tortured faces. Inside, the light is brighter than she expects, bouncing in off the clean snow outside and glistening off the sides of the ice-covered cave. It’s disappointingly small, at first, then she realizes that the jagged spikes of white in the back are merely blocking off the rest of the narrow tunnel, not marking a dead end but a road block instead. If they have the time and means to break through those spikes, there might be better shelter from the winds and cold beyond.

“’Bout time,” someone looms up out of the dim light of the cave, and Jyn jerks to a halt before her tired, sluggish brain catches up and she recognizes the speaker. Siever strides out, pulling her orange coat tight around her body as she glares at them. “Took your sweet time. Sir,” she adds a touch belatedly, glancing at Willix.

“Pirates,” Willix tells her calmly. “They came to salvage. We dealt with it.”

“Huh.” The hauler squints at them both. “Looks like they dealt with you, too.”

“Something like that,” he agrees.

“So we got a problem,” Siever says, and shivers.

Jyn snorts, and Willix’s thin mouth curves into an ironic smile. “Just the one?”

“The Talz,” Siever jerks her chin back over her broad shoulder, and Jyn pushes past her immediately, glaring. If the fucking spoiled brat hauler killed the non-Human, she’s going to shoot her in her blonde little pinhead.

“No stars,” the Talz whines from where he’s slumped against an oddly glittering wall. Jyn blinks, and realizes that the cave walls, at least here near the opening, are almost entirely translucent, arching up overhead in unnaturally smooth lines. Embedded randomly in the clear ice, she can see little bits of clouded ice suspended in isometric shapes, like dull jewels stuck at strange intervals in a glass wall. The ground is packed white snow, and the Talz ought to blend perfectly into it, except there is an ugly smear of rapidly browning purple underneath him. Jyn drops down and touches the Talz’s fluffy face, prodding until he opens all four eyes and squints at her.

“Hey, fluff,” Jyn says quietly. “Seeing any stars in there?”

He gives a series of weak burbling noises. “The space between stars is walked alone,” her translator chirps.

“Yeah, but not today, okay? Walk here with us, for now.”

“The ice is slowing the bleeding, I think,” Siever says in a tone that is far too casual to actually be indifferent. “But I don’t have anything to, you know, stop it.”

“He needs meds,” Jyn shakes her head, then regrets it when the motion makes her feel sick and wobbly, sharp spikes stabbing into her neck and shoulders. Shit, she’s messed up right now. Her hands and feet are still numb – she needs to do something about that or risk severe frostbite. A good medbay or facility can fix that kind of shit, but there’s no way she would ever be able to afford it, and no one would waste those kinds of resources on someone like her. Maybe the ship she’s supposed to pick up will have something useful. A faint blush of hope rises in her chest and dies just as quickly. There’s no way she’ll be able to get the Talz to the ship without the other two helping, and she can’t lead a damned Imperial officer to what’s probably a stolen Imperial ship. Even if he is up to some shady shit of his own.

“Yeah, well, we’re not going to get those any time soon,” Siever mutters, and Jyn privately agrees with her.

“The Imperial mining base is roughly three hours ride from here,” Willix interjects abruptly, a flickering holo image blooming in his hand. From where she’s kneeling by the Talz, Jyn can make out what looks like a stripped down map, with a blinking green light in what’s probably their own location, a large red mark that looks like a spirder-web shaped structure of some kind, and weirdly, a yellow circle glowing out in the middle of nowhere. There’s something that catches her eye about the yellow circle, but Willix snaps the map off before she can put her finger on it.

“Ride?” Siever asks brusquely. “What ride?”

“Speeder.” Jyn eyes the Talz, who is flopping one clawed hand weakly into the air in front of him, his big night vision eyes dilating in a way that worries her. Or would worry her, if she could afford to worry about a big furry man she doesn’t know and can’t help. Which she can’t. She stands up and turns away, because what else is there to do?

“You found a speeder?” Siever almost smiles, looking weirdly young and eager all of the sudden. She’s probably seven or eight years older than Jyn, but looking at her makes the thief feel…tired. Everything makes her tired right now, but Dalle Siever’s excited, hopeful face is somehow the worst of it, at this exact moment. “That’s great!” She grins at Jyn. “You came in handy there, rookie, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jyn replies listlessly. The snow on the cave floor is suddenly looking so soft and inviting. It’s death to lie down here, she knows that. But she’s just…so tired. “Sure.”

“Here,” Willix says, and pulls off his parka. “Let me just – “

“ _Avoid!_ ” The Talz bellows, lurching wildly to his feet and smashing his claws against the smooth ice behind him. His large eyes have dilated so far that the normally black circles that take up the whole eyeball have turned into black pinpricks in a field of pale blue. His daytime eyes are squeezed shut in terror, and his warbles have turned into high pitched squeals that her translator struggles to understand. “ _Avoid! Escape!”_

“Hey!” Jyn yells, darting forward just as Siever lunges to grab the flailing claws. “Hey, knock it off!”

“ _Avoid!_ ” The Talz bellows again, desperate and terrified. “ _Imperial!_ ”

Oh, shit.

“Put the damn parka back on!” Jyn shouts over her shoulder, ducking as the Talz rears back and slams his claws into the smooth ice behind him, scraping long ragged lines across the polished surface.

“Easy, easy, easy!” Siever tries to soothe him, in a decidedly un-soothing shout. “It’s okay, he’s not gonna hurt you! I mean, uh, probably.”

Jyn ducks again as the Talz slams into the ice a third time, though the movements are weaker now, the blow lighter. The purple blood is beginning to ooze down his back again, and the more he struggles, the faster his life drains. Jyn casts around helplessly for some way to pin the big man down, but the only things she can think of will only hurt him more. She can’t pin him, not with those wounds, and knocking him on the head will probably just finish him off.

She finds herself fighting a sudden burning rage at the Empire. _They love nothing and no one, save their own power,_ Saw booms in her head, one of his speeches that she knows by heart. _They sow pain and devastation in their wake, and one day they shall reap the fruits of their cruel planting._ Jyn bites down on the anger, letting it clear out some of the smog from the last hour or so, letting it burn under her skin against the numbing cold. It isn’t even surprising to anyone in this cave that the delirious non-Human would react to the sight of an Imperial uniform like this, is it?

“No threat, Waxna,” says a low, soothing voice by her ear, and Jyn nearly staggers to the side as a blue fur-lined form appears next to her, his hands up in supplication. “No threat. We follow the same paths, friend.” And then he makes a strange sort of warble in his throat. A second later, her translator chirps in her ear. _Man who walks the void_ , it rattles.

The Talz stills.

Siever grabs him and pushes him back to the ground, pulling his arms in tight and wrapping them around his own chest. “You speak Talzzi, Lieutenant?”

Willix clears his throat. “Some.”

“Wash-na?” Jyn asks quietly.

He turns and looks at her, the exhaustion back on his face and this time barely hidden at all. “His name,” he explains softly. “The closest translation, I believe, is ‘Man who walks alone between the stars.’ A name taken by Talz travelers when they leave their homeworld without others of their kind.”

“Guess an Imp mapmaker would need to know a couple different tongues to get by out here,” Siever says thoughtfully, most of her attention still on the Talz. On Waxna, Jyn corrects herself, looking down at the mournful face and frightened eyes of the man she’s been struggling to understand for days. Her thoughts turn bitter as she watches Siever pat him on his furry shoulder with awkward reassurance. Not struggling that hard, though, was she? Probably could have looked up a better translator program somewhere. Willix clearly had one, because there was no way he could have learned that Talzzi word from the piece of shite program she found.

Jyn shoves the thought away. There’s nothing she can do about it now, and anyway, they have bigger problems.

“We can’t all fit,” she says into the silence otherwise only broken by the Talz’s frightened whimpers. “On the speeder.”

“And we don’t have much time to figure a solution,” Willix nods, frowning as he looks down at Waxna.

“Yeah, cold’s gonna eat us alive if we’re stuck out here tonight,” Siever laughs nervously, not seeming to realize that she’s hunching closer to the Talz as she does.

“Less time than that, unfortunately,” Willix shakes his head. “Did you see the clouds dropping out there? The big snow storm to the south is moving this way. It will hit us in roughly four hours, I think.”

That jolts through the haze in Jyn’s brain. “We’re three hours from the base?”

“At the speeder’s best velocity, which it certainly will not make if we all try to load up on it.” He turns and meets her eyes, and the frown on his face abruptly deepens in a way that makes Jyn’s hair stand on end. “Are you alright?”

“Fine.” She grimaces, because that is so far from the truth she can’t even pretend for the sake of stubbornness. “Cold,” she amends, and turns her shoulder to him so he can’t see her face clearly. Her ears are starting to hurt from the cold, too, and her every beat of her heart sends a pulse of pain up into her head. All this glaring white must be getting to her. And the crash, and her plans all going belly up, and, and….and lots of things. It’s been a shite day, that’s all she’s saying.

“You look pale,” Willix says slowly, stepping closer. “Let me just look at your eyes, please.”

She jerks her head away from his stretched out hand and snarls at him, baring all her teeth. “ _Bats to explode from your anus,”_ she growls in Huttese, and drops her hand to the blaster hilt at her belt.

To her shock, Willix laughs. He immediately covers it with a cough, but it’s too late. For a moment his whole face brightens with startled amusement, and suddenly she sees that he is only a few years older than her. It’s a jarring shift in her view of him, and Jyn realizes that her mouth is hanging open slightly as she stares at him. He seems to catch himself at the same time, the smile fading into quieter humor as he raises his eyebrows at her archly. “ _Oozing pustules to infect your ear canals_ ,” he responds in the same tongue, almost cheerfully. Jyn doesn’t smile, but she kind of wants to. That’s a good one, she should remember it.

“Uh, sir?” Siever’s voice sounds both uncertain and a bit wary. When Jyn glances over, she can see the hauler looking tentatively between them, a lost expression on her face, her big hands still folded into the Talz’s fur. Jyn doubts the big girl speaks Hutt, but she definitely knows that the ‘rookie’ and the Imperial officer are sharing some kind of conversation that leaves her out in the cold.

Which is stupid, and dangerous. The hauler’s confused face snaps Jyn out of the weird little bubble she had momentarily stepped into, and she moves away from Willix with a firm step. “The speeder,” she says loudly. “Four hours until the storm.”

Willix’s eyebrows draw down in a frown again, but he lets her move out of arm’s reach. “And three to get to the base, at top speed.”

Siever hunches a little closer to Waxna and asks, still in that same uncertain tone, “So, uh, who goes?”

“Stars void/excrete together,” the Talz warbles through Jyn’s crappy translator. He waves reaches out and grabs at Siever’s arm, missing by a wide margin until she reaches up and lets him latch on. Waxna follows the line of her muscles up to her face, and pats it gently, his three-inch long talons catching in a few strands of frazzled blond hair.

“Yes, we know” Willix replies gently. Jyn catches him looking at her from the corner of his eye, and adds, “It is best to walk the void between stars together, if possible.”

She really hates this translator.

“Walk through the stars, sure,” Siever mumbles, ducking her head a little and pulling the Talz’s claws from her hair with surprisingly delicacy in her thick fingers. “But we can’t all drive through the snow together, right?”

“No.” Willix tugs at his jacket, and throws Jyn another covert look. Or what he probably thinks is a covert look. She glowers at him pointedly until he turns away. “It can most likely…” he pauses, all final traces of humor or kindness melting from his face. For a moment, he looks like an Imperial officer again. “The three Humans fit, and still go fast enough to outrun the storm,” he says bluntly.

“No,” Jyn snaps, at the same time as Dalle. The echo surprises her, and from Dalle’s pinched expression, it surprises her too. Jyn’s not sure if the hauler is shocked at Jyn’s refusal, or her own. Probably doesn’t matter.

Willix smiles thinly, the cold sheen of an Imp cracking, discarded. Jyn gets the strange, unsettling impression that he had intended to spark exactly that reaction in them both, calling up the cold mask to frighten and provoke. Why he would do that, she can’t guess, but it’s clear he’s playing some kind of game here. “No, I thought not. Fortunately, I believe both of you can manage with Waxna, although it will be a tight call. You will have to go straight towards the base, no stops, no drifting off course. And if you send out a distress signal along Imperial channels,” he is tapping at his datapad now, the little holo map popping up again, along with a side stream of frequencies that scroll by too fast to read from a distance, “then you will possibly be picked up before then by the salvage shuttles.”

“Assuming there are shuttles,” Jyn murmurs, her attention caught again by the strange yellow symbol on the map. There’s something about the position of it, something that bothers her, but as she tries to focus her eyes on it, a sharp spike of pain lances through the back of her head. Shit. All this white is really getting to her, along with the bruises, cuts, and general adrenaline crash. Nothing to be done about it. She squeezes her eyes shut tightly for a moment to push the pain back down inside, and then strides to Willix’s side. “You go with them. The Imps on base will listen to you when you ask for help for –“ she gestures at Waxna, who limply waves a claw at them.

Willix opens his mouth, but Siever beats him to it, rolling her eyes and saying loudly, “Hale, you’re the smallest of us all. You weigh, what, a couple stone? I’ve got _boots_ that are heavier than you. If three go, then one of them has to be you, dummy.”

Which is normally a logic that Jyn could get behind, but this time, Jyn has an out. If they are only three hours by speeder from the base, then it’s highly possible the hidden ship is near here. As soon as the others are gone, she can check her own map, plot the line, and head straight for it. But she needs the Imp gone, at least. If he even is an Imp.

Now where did that thought come from?

“She’s right, Hale,” Willix says calmly. “You are the most obvious choice. You take Waxna and Dalle back to base, and return to your cargo ship. If the base won’t offer treatment, the _Muunyak_ has a decent medical facility onboard.”

 _I’m not going back to the_ _Muunyak_ , Jyn manages not to say, her thoughts still whirling around the strange idea that Lieutenant Willix may not be…well, a lieutenant. Or Willix. He’s definitely up to something shady out here, she’s known that from the moment she clamped eyes on him. But how shady, exactly, is it? And wait, does it matter? She still needs him gone if she’s going to finish the job. That part’s important, finishing the job. Willix being gone.

And anyway, the hauler captain won’t waste medical supplies on Priya Hale.

“Siever,” Jyn says at last. “Take Waxna. You’ll move faster. Get back, and send a search party for us. Time’s running out,” she raises her voice to cut off Siever’s obvious protest, “both for the storm and his injuries.” She doesn’t wait for a further response, just walks over and grabs Waxna’s feebly waving claws. “Up, fluffy,” she commands. “Time to get up.” She heaves, but to her continued disgust, her muscles merely quiver uselessly against the weight. The stress and cold have left her pathetically weak. Jyn stops tugging and makes a show of checking the Talz’s eyes, as if she’s only stopping because she’s worried about Waxna’s wellbeing, not because she’s too weak to actually budge the big man.

“Hang on, hang on,” Siever grumbles, climbing to her feet and sliding her arms around Waxna’s ribs. She braces, lifts with her legs in true hauler style, and pulls the Talz upright. He sways and murmurs in his burbling language, something so scattered that Jyn’s translator doesn’t even bother, and pats Siever’s head again. Or at least attempts to, his hands mostly missing and poking at the air. “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Siever replies. “Come on. Meds first. Stars second.”

“Hale,” Willix says as Siever drags the nearly unconscious Talz towards the entrance of the cave. “There’s still enough power on the speeder to carry you all.”

“You’re not much heavier than me,” she shoots back. “Skinny arse like yours. _You_ go.”

The look on his face when she comments on his arse almost makes her want to laugh again, if she weren’t feeling so sick. Damn it, now she’s going to be trapped out here with a (possible) Imperial officer, a storm rolling in, and a killer headache. She’ll probably need him to get through the storm, but after that…

After that, she’s going to have to shake him. Somehow.

Jyn hadn’t really noticed the change in temperature when she walked into the cave, but the moment she walks back out of it, the cold hits her all over again, so intense that it nearly locks her muscles up like a statue. She manages to shake it off, and keep her face stony as she helps Siever shove Waxna onto the speeder and climb on before him. The Talz is still too limp, so Willix ties a thin cord around his big shoulders, lashing him to Siever’s back. It isn’t a great harness, but it’s not a bad rig-up considering the length of the cord and the fact that she can see Willix’s hands starting to stiffen from cold as he works, even with his gloves on. Finally, they get him settled as well as they can, and Siever grabs the speeder handles.

“I’ll send help,” she says, just barely getting the words out through teeth already beginning to chatter. Behind her, an ominous white cloud rolls silently along the horizon, deceptively peaceful and still. Jyn isn’t fooled – she knows death when she sees it, and that storm is nothing but death for anyone caught out in it. Siever follows Jyn’s line of sight, and shudders hard enough to make Waxna warble in distress. “Just ha-hang in there, right?”

“Come,” Waxna says, his arm flailing out and missing Jyn’s shoulder by a parsec. “I wish with no desire to walk alone in voids. Wish with no desire the stars darken in voids. Come.”

“Stars are still there,” Jyn tells him quietly. “You’ll see them again.”

“And not alone, I think,” Willix adds from behind her, his hand pressing between her shoulder blades. Jyn sees Siever’s face turn from Jyn’s to something just over her shoulder, and if Jyn weren’t so fucking tired and uncertain and angry and…well, if Jyn were more herself at the moment, she would completely agree with Siever’s bewilderment at Willix’s hand steady on her back. But she isn’t herself, for some reason, and she has the oddest feeling that if he were to take away the pressure of his palm between her shoulder blades, she would plummet into the snow and never get up again. So she ignores it, ignores Siever’s face, and points towards the distant red glow on the edge of the horizon. “Mining base,” she says flatly. “Go.”

“Right. They’ll co-come for you. Stay al-alive, right?”

“Thank you, Dalle,” Willix says, his hand the only thing that feels solid in the world. It’s all the white, Jyn decides. She’s floating in a white-washed world, and freezing to death besides. Enough with the sentimental nonsense.

“Go,” Jyn barks at Siever, and marches back into the cave as fast as she can. Behind her, the coughing roar of the engine crescendos and then fades into the distance.

And then she’s alone in a tiny ice cave with a man wearing an Imperial uniform. He is wearing the uniform, even if she can’t currently see all of it. Boots are definitely Imperial, she can see that. His hair is messed up pretty bad inside that furry hood, but beard still neat, still within regulations. Features too sharp. Eyes too knowing.

She needs to ditch him.

“It’s not enough,” Willix tells her, and Jyn stares at him, her brain struggling to process as the exhaustion haze thickens in her head.

“What?”

“The cave,” he clarifies, and his hand is between her shoulder blades again. She knows this because she’s leaning back against it. Letting him brace her. If he let go, she would fall.

 _Madness,_ Saw shouts in her ear, although it is oddly muffled in white cotton. _Madness to trust a man who wears the grey._

“I don’t trust you,” Jyn tells him, tells Saw. Herself. “I can’t.”

“I know,” he nods. “But right now, you don’t have a choice.”

“Trapped,” she agrees, and hates how sadly it comes out.

“I think,” Willix pauses, clears his throat. “Alright. Here’s what we do.” His voice is abruptly hard again, although he’s still speaking in that thicker accent. His real accent, maybe. Or else this is the con and the Imperial officer is the truth.

Shit. She is so, so tired.

“First, we are going to break through those ice spikes over there,” Willix who might not be Willix is saying, his hand still pressed against her back, propping her up. “Looks like a bigger cave back there, and we won’t survive the storm this close to the opening. We’ll get back there, set up with the heater, and then,” his hand slides from her back to her shoulders, both hands on her shoulders, he’s turning her to face him and she should shrug him off, should step back, should punch him right in his nose – his nose has already been broken once, she can see the marred lines of it, wonder who broke that? Weird, an Imperial officer with a broken nose. Unless he’s not. Well, the nose is definitely broken, or was, but the officer –

“And then,” Willix says again, a little louder, as if he’s trying to get her attention, “you’re going to let me see where that blood on your neck is coming from.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If it matters to you, I decided that the pirates who attacked the shuttle were from the [Zann Consortium](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Zann_Consortium/Legends), a powerful organization in the Outer Territories that had no problem stealing from the Imperials with impunity. It was maybe a bit much to have them come into Ilum's atmosphere...but then, there must be something of value on the planet if the Imps were willing to slag it, right? Or so I imagine the local leader of this branch of the organization assumed.


	3. The Cave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to delay with this. I had a solid ending, but upon re-reading, I realized it was...well, dull. Hardly any motion, too much talking, and not one single explosion. Unacceptable. So I scrapped it and started again. Unfortunately I ran a bit long-winded, and after 10k words I figured I needed to split the chapter again. It happens. So here's part 3, soon to be followed with the conclusion part! Hope you enjoy the copious use of the word "cold" and some flirting. Plus a lamp, a memory, and the weirdness of kyber.

It’s weirdly bright in the tunnels behind the spiky ice, which does nothing for her aching head and insidious nausea. Jyn expects _some_ visibility, of course – the tunnel walls are a clear smooth-glaze ice, and while some of them are as irregular as any natural formation, other parts of it seem almost rigidly even and regular. Light ought to bounce around in here easily enough, but it’s far brighter than it should be. The whole cave system feels strange, some combination of wild nonsensical tunnels and gently rounded chambers of ice that pop up randomly along the tunnels, like bubbles frozen in place. Here and there she thinks she can even see what might be (or might once have been) a straight edge carved into the walls, or a handful of cracks that seem too uniform to be natural. In some spots the tunnel swoops low, rough and jagged hunks of grittier pack ice hanging in threatening stalactites overhead. In other places, the ceiling soars away into a narrow, irregular chimneys. It reminds Jyn of a town in Onderon, where once the locals had built an imposing tower of commerce and government. She had seen it twice: once when it was welcoming a diplomat from the Imperial Capital of Coruscant…and again, a day later, a ruin collapsed in on itself and burning.

Flames notwithstanding, this cave looks a lot more like the second day than the first.

The ache in her head pounds harder against her temples, her stomach flips. She swallows, breathes, ignores the pull of dried blood on the back of her neck. Not now. Not now. She’s in a cave with an Imperial officer, lost on the surface of a hostile planet, and the increasing roar of wind at her back says the storm is coming. The blood can wait, no matter how many surreptitious looks that officer keeps shooting at her collar.

It’s too bright in here. She keeps thinking she sees movement out of the corners of her eyes, but it’s always just a little shimmer of light on the ice. The slivers of thicker ice inside the walls catch the rapidly fading daylight from the cave opening at odd angles, and if Jyn didn’t know better, she would think the reflections brighter than the source. That’s not possible for ice alone, so maybe the slivers are some kind of mineral? What mineral did that? She feels like she must have heard of it before. Maybe something that Mama –

A beeping sound distracts her from her completely pointless contemplation, and Jyn realizes with a jolt that they’ve been walking much longer than she can actively recall. At her side, the Imperial fumbles with the little holomap in his hand, muttering something under his breath that sounds like a curse as the image flickers ominously. He taps at the little projector in his palm, but a moment later, the image goes fuzzy from static. All that hovers over his hand now is a blur of white light with a pale green dot in the center, and a faint yellow blip that makes her think of a candle flame fluttering in the wind.

And then the light goes out, and he sighs. “Interference,” Willix shakes his head. “Lost the signal.”

“Too deep underground."

“Or something in the ice. Perhaps the ky- the minerals on this planet.” He covers his tiny stutter so smoothly that for a moment Jyn thinks she imagined it, but no, headache or not, she knows what someone catching a misspeak sounds like. Some of Saw’s agents used to do that, the small swallow and the too-casual glance when they almost gave away more than they wanted. The crash must have rattled Willix too, if he’s stumbling like that.

Another howl behind them, an icy gust blasts around the corner and hits them square in the back. Jyn shudders, the tensing of her muscles sends a harsh jolt of pain up the back of her neck and into her head. She closes her eyes against it and forces her jaw to relax. Gritting her teeth only makes it worse. _Just breathe. Breathe through it._

_Now move._

When she opens her eyes, Willix is watching her with his arms crossed, no longer even attempting to be subtle about it. “Your head,” he starts.

“Can wait,” she cuts him off, and pushes further down the tunnel. It branches into three uneven openings a few meters down, one branch looking uneven and treacherous, piles of ice and snow littering the path. The other two are eerily straight-hewn, although the far right tunnel bends sharply away and out of sight. Jyn doesn’t hesitate, she simply marches down the center path, as confident as if she’s lived here her whole life. Willix follows silently.

About three minutes later, she marches right back out, the Imperial officer scratching at his beard to hide his smile at her side. Jyn glowers at him, and he dutifully wipes the smirk from his face. “I didn’t see the dead end, either,” he offers peacefully.

Jyn grunts at him, and chooses the far right path this time. Hopefully there isn’t another solid sheet of ice blocking the end of that one, too.

Fortunately, there isn’t, and the bend in the tunnel serves to finally thwart the irregular and painfully cold blasts of storm winds that have been increasingly buffeting their backs. The tunnel opens into a series of small pockets of air inside the ice walls. The light from outside is definitely failing now as the storm moves in and they move deeper into the tunnels. The gloom makes the little air pockets and chambers look uncomfortably like cells, though they have no doors. Willix eyes them speculatively, taps her shoulder and points to the smallest one. It’s only about two meters wide, and the ceiling is so low that it will just miss scraping the top of Jyn’s head. The officer will definitely have to stoop to walk inside. He doesn’t seem concerned about it, already walking forward and bowing his head to shuffle in. “Best option.”

She starts to shake her head, thinks better of it. She doesn’t want to stop, doesn’t want to hunker down in the chill with an Imp. She definitely doesn’t want to crawl into a space roughly the size of a closet with him. But her head is heavy, heavy, full of cold iron and burned out anger congealing with frustration and pain and…why is she even here? Was the bounty on this job worth this?

Well. It’s not like she had a choice. It’s not like she has one now.

Story of her damn life.

Jyn follows the officer into the small ice chamber and crouches with him in the center of it. It doesn’t surprise her when he rifles through his overstuffed pack and pulls out a collapsible survival lamp, setting it up with the swift ease of familiarity. The lamp is roughly the size of her boot, and when he flicks it on, both a gentle golden light and a relieving warmth emanate from it. It’s not strong enough to turn their little space comfortable, but it helps. Jyn squints at the lamp, watching the light burn steady and bright. It’s an older model, but well maintained and with a fully charged energy pack. It won’t flicker and die in her hands. It won’t leave her in the cold wet dark. Something rattles, the officer rips open a tiny vacuum sealed packet that unfolds into a relatively thick survival blanket. Oh good. Wait. No. Only good for him.  She doesn’t have a blanket. She barely has anything, everything in the galaxy she owns – a few stolen bits of clothes and some tech she needs for slicing – it’s all in the skimpy pack on her aching back. Jyn goes back to scowling at the lamp, because there’s nothing to be done about that now, and the officer shuffles around in his pack some more, cloth rustling and something metal clinking in his hands. She ought to pay more attention to that, actually. To his hands, hidden in a pack, grabbing for who-knew-what weapon or… _situational awareness will save you when all else fails_ , Saw rumbles, huge and imposing in his heavy armor as he puts the new knife in her small hands, _the strongest fighter in the world is worthless before the unexpected blade_.

“Hale!” Willix barks, and Jyn startles at the sharp note in his raised tone, raising her head from the lamp and staring at him. Oh. Not the first time he’s called her name, from the look on his face.

Shit. The head injury, she thinks fuzzily. Making her drift. Saw will be so disappointed.

“Alright,” Willix’s voice drops into a softer tone, low and soothing, like he’s coaxing a wild animal to let him pet it. “I’m going to come over there, okay?” He holds up something small and squarish in his hand. The light is getting worse, shadows creeping in around them. The ice walls are less a translucent blueish-white and more an opaque grey. The tunnel just past Willix’s shoulder is almost night-dark now.

It’s both threatening and comforting, in a way. She doesn’t want to be alone in the dark again, but then, people can’t see her in the dark. It’s safer. Quieter.

“I don’t need it,” she tells him, mildly proud of how little she slurs the words.

“I’m going to scan your injury, Priya,” Willix is much closer, he must have slipped around the lamp and to her side while she was staring at the tunnel. The use of her fake name almost makes her smile, which is absurd, but she made that name up off the top of her head and he’s saying it so gently now, like it’s a real name. Like it matters. Like she matters. Saw gave her good training on interrogation techniques, on the ways that Imperial recruiters and interrogators and ISB agents get into a person’s head and poke all the right buttons and make that person tell them anything at all, make them _want_ to tell, make them trust. He sounds like that, a little. She thinks. It’s been awhile since anyone tried to be gentle with her, awhile since she’s had anything valuable enough to be worth it, but he’s the best she’s run across so far.

“You’re good at this,” she mumbles as he reaches slowly and carefully for her hood.

“I passed my basic medical course,” he replies, tugging her hood down with care and holding the device in his hand up to her ear. Ah. Portable medical scanner. Not comprehensive, they could only hold enough medical data for one or two species at a time and couldn’t get molecular scans or anything. But it can figure out if she has-

“Concussion,” Willix confirms almost exactly in synch with her thoughts. His fingertips press against the back of her head, just behind her ear, and Jyn jerks away. The move sends a wave of nausea through her, and her stomach heaves as she slips and drops clumsily onto her hip. She clamps her mouth shut stubbornly and breathes through her nose.

“Sorry, sorry, it’s alright,” Willix soothes, grabbing her arm and pulling her up to her knees again. “Sorry. The welt is larger than I thought. Easy, Priya. Easy. Breathe.”

“Stop calling me Priya like that,” she hisses through her teeth, ignoring the sting of bile in the back of her throat. She’s not going to throw up. She can’t waste the calories, and anyway, this is the best shelter they’ve got. It will stink like hell, cold or no cold, if she vomits all over it.

“My apologies for the familiarity,” Willix says a touch stiffly, not understanding, his accent turning muddy and unrecognizable again. Retreating into the mask. “Here, you will need this.”

He drops a small orange pill in her hand, and then slides awkwardly around to the other side of the lamp, his shoulders and head bent unnaturally low under the short ceiling until he crouches once again.

 _I meant with that tone,_ Jyn thinks for some stupid reason, because she had. It’s just weird, how he says her fake name. Priya Hale doesn’t matter, so it’s weird. Or maybe, Jyn fumbles for her canteen and shakes it, noting with relief there is still some liquid sloshing around inside. Maybe it just feels unfair. Priya gets gentleness, when Priya isn’t real. Jyn is real, and she gets…

The water of her canteen hits the back of her throat with the orange pill; it’s so miserably cold that she can feel it running like frozen fingers through the center of her chest to her gut. It clears her mind a little, and she knows that in a few minutes, the pill will kick in and hopefully prevent her from any more ridiculous, dangerous thinking. She will be able to focus again. She reaches up and prods tenderly at her head, and feels something slick and a little oily in her hair. She tenses, her eyes snapping to Willix, who meets her eyes and nods slowly.

Jyn pulls her hand away from the huge welt on the back of her head and holds her gloved fingers up to her eyes. A faint sheen of some kind of gel covers her index finger, and when she cautiously sniffs it – “Bacta?”

Willix sets the medical scanner back in his pack and holds up a small tube that she hadn’t noticed in his free hand. Saw would be so disappointed in her. She’d have observance drills for hours – if he were here, which he isn’t, so she doesn’t care.

“I’m sorry I pressed so hard,” Willix interrupts her spiraling thoughts again, and tucks the tube away into the pack.

“’S fine.” Jyn settles on her heels and squints into the growing darkness at him. Bacta is expensive, and hard to get ahold of. Hard for most people, that is. “Guess a lieutenant rates his own stash,” she prods carefully.

Willix shrugs one shoulder and doesn’t look at her.

This probably won’t get her anywhere, but she figures it’s worth the shot, and it’s not like she has much else to do at the moment. So she tries again. “Mapmakers work solitary a lot, I hear,” she muses aloud. “They must kit you out with everything.”

“I like to be prepared,” is all she gets in response, as noncommittal as the ice around them. She catches him glance at her from the corner of his eye, his brow arching ever so slightly at her attempts to draw information from him.

If her head didn’t still ache so much, she might roll her eyes. Instead, Jyn flaps a hand at him in (temporary) defeat, and falls silent.

Willix tugs a thin tarp from his pack, rolled into a little sausage hardly bigger than her thumb. He shakes it out too, and with a lot of dramatic crackling, a silvery thermo pad unfolds. He lays it down in his half of the space, then folds the thick survival blanket in two on top of it, making a cozy little nest by the heat lamp. It probably won’t be enough to keep him really warm as the temperature continues to fall through the night, but Jyn is properly jealous of his set up anyway. She pulls her own pack into her lap but doesn’t fish through it. She’s got one more thin shirt she can pull on, but nothing else in there will help her at all. She decides to wait until Willix sleeps, or at least curls up in his sleeping roll and pretends to, before she pulls out her embarrassingly inadequate attempt to keep warm.

She’s probably going to end up doing jumping exercises or push ups all night, something to keep the blood moving in her limbs. She’s done it before, kept herself up for at least two days of constant activity. It’s hell on her body after the second night, though, and with the head injury already making her thoughts scattered, she’s going to be horribly slow witted.

No choice. It’s that or freeze solid in the night.

Just to rub in that Jyn is spectacularly unprepared to hang out in the frozen wastelands, Willix pulls a ration pack from his bag and starts tearing it carefully open. In her defense, Jyn thinks, wrapping her arms tight around her waist and glowering at the lamp again, she had intended to nab all her gear from the Imperial mining base. So it isn’t like she came down here clueless and helpless. She has been doing this kind of work for almost four years now; she knows how to steal from Imperial supply lockers and depots like she knows how to breathe. She isn’t a complete rube stumbling around on her first ever con job. She had a _plan._

Fucking pirates.

Willix sets the ration pack over the heat lamp, and watches impassively as the frozen block of proteins and mashed fibers thaws into an unappetizing lump. “Better than starving,” he says dismissively when he catches her looking. Jyn scowls and looks away, irritated to be caught staring like a hungry waif at the window. The cave walls are nearly dark purple now, the tunnel beyond completely black. The lamp light catches on the slivers of hardened ice inside the walls, glittering like little jewels embedded in…

Wait.

Jyn pushes herself awkwardly to her feet and moves to the back wall, only a few steps away, and nearly presses her nose to the surface as she squints at the glittering lights inside. What she had taken for pieces of rime ice inside the smooth surfaces looks, on closer inspection, like tiny flakes of irregular quartz. Except quartz only reflects light back in the same color it receives, and these…Jyn tilts her head to one side, then the other. She’s not completely sure in this low light, and with thick ice obscuring them, but it seems like the little crystals in the ice glow in a rainbow of colors, sea green and soft lavender, blue pale as ice and red bright as blood. The colors shift and shimmer as she moves her head, and Jyn’s seen that kind of reaction before, in certain lights. In certain places.

She glances back, but Willix has pulled out his holomap and is fiddling with the beeping interface, wholly absorbed in trying to reconnect to the tracking signals. Jyn turns her back on him completely, and carefully pushes aside her tightly-buttoned collar. Her gloves are thin enough that she can feel the sharp edges of her mother’s kyber under her fingertips, and she draws the crystal pendant out and holds it up. She holds it up high enough to get a little of the lamp light spilling over her shoulder, and hopes that Willix doesn’t pay too close attention. It’s just a little chunk of stone, anyway, valuable on the market but not really worth enough to try and wrestle it from her in the middle of this frozen hell.

She hopes.

The crystal glows softly in her hand, throwing off a faint rainbow sheen of colors against her gloves. Sea green and soft lavender. Blue pale as ice, red bright as blood.

Jyn tucks the necklace hastily under her shirt again, ignoring the chilled surface of the stone as it bites into the skin of her relatively warm chest. The crystal warms almost immediately, and Jyn takes the moment to compose her face. Nothing of interest here, she tells herself firmly. Nothing to talk about.

When she’s certain that her expression conveys exactly that sentiment, she turns and kneels again by the lamp.

“It’s kyber,” Willix says casually, reaching for the food on the lamp.

Jyn grunts, and lets the unnecessary impassiveness fall from her face. “Guess so.”

He picks up the hot plate gingerly around the edges, but his grip slips and the plate wobbles unsteadily. Instinctively, he reaches his other hand up to catch it, and that’s when Jyn sees it. A crease of pain flashes across his face, his mouth twisting into a grimace that he wipes away almost instantly. His right arm moves oddly, as if the muscles protest the movement, and she realizes that she hasn’t seen him raise that arm more than a few inches from his side since they entered the cave.

“You’re injured,” she says flatly.

“Minor twinge,” he replies so fast and smooth that she knows he’s been waiting to say it, rehearsing his reaction for when she inevitably noted the problem.

“Banthashit,” she shoots back in exactly the same tone.

It makes him chuckle under his breath, but then he shakes his head. “It’s fine.”

Jyn points to her ear. “So is this.”

Willix balances the ration packet against his knee with his bad arm and reaches into his pack with the other. “Head injuries are entirely different from sore muscles.”

“Do this,” Jyn commands, raising her hands up and clasping them before her, like she’s aiming an invisible blaster at a foe directly in front of her.

Willix scowls.

“Right,” Jyn drops her arms. “So, _banthashit_ ,” she repeats meaningfully. She hesitates, but concussion pills are expensive and bacta is hard to find, so she bites down on the fear and forces herself to ask. “Want me to look at it?” It comes out a little more tentative than she means for it to, so she supplements by glaring at him.

“I…thank you,” he replies, sounding just as cautious and uncertain as she. “It’s not necessary.”

“If those pirates come around,” she starts, then stops, because honestly, if the pirates catch them in this little hole, there is little to no chance they will come out of it alive, whether or not his arm is in working condition.

 “It will heal on it’s own,” he says quietly, and pulls a small piece of metal from his pack. It takes Jyn a moment to recognize it, because she hasn’t seen one since…well, the Partisans carried them around all the time, never knew when a meal would be available. She left hers back at the base when Saw took her to the bunker on Tamsye Prime. If she’d known he was going to dump her there, she would have brought her own little collapsible plate, too.

Jyn snorts, because trust an Imperial officer to be too dainty to just eat out of the ration container, like a slob. No, he’s spooning the food over onto his little fold out plate, carefully dividing it into two equal portions before he hands it across the lamp.

Jyn blinks.

“This is kind of an awkward position,” he says dryly, leaning forward with his arm outstretched.

“I don’t need your food,” Jyn snaps.

He doesn’t move, watching her steadily with the plate outstretched. Her stomach rumbles slightly, thankfully too low for him to hear. She thinks. But she’s still not going to take food from an Imp like a bloody grateful little orphan, and if he thinks feeding her will make her scramble for his favor in hopes of more scraps, he is dead wrong.

“Bargain,” he says, cutting into her angry thoughts.

Jyn lifts her chin.

“You eat,” he says slowly, “and I’ll let you check – “ he jerks his head towards his bad arm.

“Sounds like a better bargain for you than me.”

His voice turns oddly rough around the edges. “Not really.”

She knows that voice. She knows that trepidation, recognizes the way his shoulders stiffen and his eyes shutter closed. She knows someone recoiling from vulnerability like she knows her way around a truncheon, a blaster, a knife. She had sounded exactly like that, not twenty minutes ago when he moved close to scan her head, her injuries.

Jyn takes the plate from his hand. The food is bland as any ration pack, but filling enough and warm. They eat in silence, listening to the distant howl of wind. The temperature drops more, and Jyn would pull her knees in tight to her chest and huddle for warmth except she has nothing to sit on. Her boots provide her body with at least a tiny bit of protection from the icy floor, but she’s either going to be kneeling or walking all night. That’s really her only option. After she checks Willix’s messed up arm, she will maybe take a quick lap down the tunnel, as far as the lamp light reaches, anyway. Maybe jog back and forth a bit. It’s a bit of a waste of energy, but it will keep her out of contact with the ice as much as possible.

The walls are a deep, unrelenting purple now, with a faint gold sheen from the lamp light and the subtle glitter of kyber embedded in the walls like tiny stars. Between the cold, the dark, and the tiny lights, it looks a little like the view from a starship viewport. Jyn wonders inanely if this is what the Talz pictured when he spoke of walking the void between stars. Probably not. She wonders if he made it to the base, if Siever actually bothered to grant him access to the _Muunyak_ medbay. Maybe Dalle just kicked him off the speeder the moment they were out of sight, and rode as fast as she could to the base.

She forces the cynical thought from her mind and turns to Willix, shoving the now empty plate back to him. “Arm,” she commands as he takes it and collapses it down.

“Shoulder,” he corrects, a mix of resignation and concern hidden admirably inside casual indifference. If Jyn didn’t know exactly what to listen for, she might even be fooled into thinking he didn’t care that much about letting her get so close. She clears her throat and tries to mimic his voice from earlier. "It’s alright,” she tells him, voice low, head tilted down and posture hunkered a little to try and look smaller, less dangerous. “I’m going to scan you.”

Willix gives her a look. “Are you comforting me or threatening me?” When Jyn blinks at him in confusion, his mouth quirks. “You look like you’re about to pounce.”

She gives up. “Just give me the damn scanner.”

The smirk still hovers around the corners of his lips as he pulls the medical scanner from his pack and holds it out to her. “Anyone ever tell you that you have excellent bedside manner, doctor?”

“No.”

“Surprising.”

This time, Jyn does roll her eyes. It sends a small twinge of pain through her head, but it’s worth it. “Jacket,” she orders impatiently, taking the scanner and turning it on.

The smirk fades from his face, replaced by the neutral mask he wore the first time she saw him on the cargo ship. This time, however, his eyes are just as shuttered and blank as his expression, as empty as any of the Empire’s best servants. “Of course,” he says, his accent blurring again until it’s almost impossible to place. Like a switch flipped somewhere inside him, Lieutenant Willix of the Imperial Army sits in the cave with her, distant and uninterested.

Jyn flicks his ear, hard.

“Ah!” He whips his head around and glares at her. “What was that?” His voice slips right back into the thicker Mid Rim accent – it’s comforting, in a way, to know that this is his real voice, his real accent. She wonders briefly where he’s actually from, then dismisses the question from her mind. Not relevant.

“I’m not strip-searching you,” she glares right back at him. “Just take off your damn jacket for three seconds so the scanner works.”

“I was doing that,” he grumbles, and reaches for the zipper with his good arm. He still looks wary, but at least his features aren’t as cold as the walls around them. He struggles out of the parka and pulls it into his lap to keep it from sitting directly on the frozen floor. Jyn swallows as his movement reveals the crisp grey of the Imperial uniform jacket once more, the ribbons all aligned perfectly, the creases somehow still sharp even after being squashed under the parka. But Jyn’s not afraid of a piece of clothing, and he doesn’t know who she is anyway, he never will, so she mentally slaps herself and raises the scanner.

Before she can run it along his back, Willix unsnaps the grey jacket and yanks it off. He’s wearing a thick thermal shirt underneath, but it’s nowhere near enough in this bitter cold and he starts shivering immediately. Still, he meticulously folds the damn thing up and sets it firmly into his pack, not meeting her eyes.

Jyn runs the scan on his shoulder. Nothing shows on the…oh, there it is. “You need a bone stabilizer,” she tells him briskly, shutting off the scanner and tossing it lightly over his legs to land on top of the folded jacket in the pack. “Fractured scapula.”

He sighs. “Of course it is.”

“You crashed a shuttle into the ice and then wrestled a pirate,” Jyn reminds him as he pulls a small syringe and a tiny bottle of greenish liquid from his personal medkit. Bone stabilizers are less expensive than bacta, but still more than she’s had access to in a long time. He really is well prepared, this mapmaker. “You didn’t think you were walking away from that unscathed, did you?”

“ _I_ didn’t crash the shuttle,” he protests under his breath, but she doesn’t bother to respond and he gives up the argument. He fills the syringe with the green liquid, and then holds it out to her. “If you don’t mind,” he says after a moment of startled silence.

Jyn takes the syringe carefully – he’s just going to hand it to her? With his neck this close, his back half-turned toward her? But then, he handed her a blaster earlier, didn’t he?

The man must have some kind of death wish, although he hasn’t acted particularly recklessly that she can think of. Other than handing a total stranger a bunch of deadly weapons. Maybe he simply can’t imagine that a citizen of the Empire would dare attack an Imperial officer of his caliber.

She eyes his tense form, the way he keeps his gaze rigidly on the lamp as he waits for her plunge the syringe into his body, and knows that this is not the case. That is not the body language of a man who feels safe in his supremacy. Or at all.

That thought comes out of nowhere, and rattles her a little more than she’s willing to admit right now. Hastily, Jyn clears her throat and taps his shoulder with one finger. He doesn’t flinch, but he goes so still at her touch that he might as well have. “Need a clear patch of skin.”

“It’s freezing in here,” he mutters, but obligingly unbuttons the top of his shirt until he can pull the material down enough to expose his shoulder. As she expects, there is a massive purpling bruise across the back of his shoulder, and the skin at the edges of the bruise is red and slightly swollen. A nasty hit, this. His skin pebbles in the cold, and Jyn moves as quickly as she dares with the syringe, aiming it at the spot the sensor had highlighted as fractured. It’s a bit tricky because he’s shivering harder now, but she manages to aim and stab down right into the bone. Willix inhales sharply, and Jyn’s not without some sympathy. Shots directly to the bone kriffing _hurt_. She depresses the syringe and waits for the green liquid to drain into the fracture.

Something faded and red on his shoulder blade catches her eye, a scabbed over mark of some kind. Frowning, Jyn angles her head a little to see down the back of his shirt better. Another injury from the crash? No, this looks old, partially healed, and there is a strange sort of blue-black color to it. Not another bruise, these lines are defined and specific – oh. An old tattoo, currently in the long, painful process of being lasered off his skin. Funny, she would have expected an Imperial officer to get the much-less painful and prolonged microbe removal, if he was trying to get rid of some past bad decision-making. Maybe the name of an old lover or some insipid band he liked as a teen.

The green liquid empties from the syringe and Jyn pulls it clear from his skin. Willix sighs and lets his white-knuckled grip on his shirt front relax, causing the material to fall a little more lax across his back. It gives Jyn a much better view of the tattoo, and her stomach clenches as she suddenly recognizes the very distinct line of numbers and letters branded on his shoulder blade.

He must sense something in her silence, because Willix pulls his shirt closed and throws his jacket on as quickly as he can. “Problem?”

Jyn sets the syringe in his lap and backs away to her side of the lamp. “You’ve been in the Crypt,” she says flatly.

Willix freezes with his parka zipper halfway up. Then he nods, pulling the parka all the way closed and tucking his hands into his pockets. “Yes.”

“As a prisoner,” she presses, eyes narrow. “That’s a prison tattoo.”

“For a blacksite Imperial prison in the Outer Reaches,” he agrees, voice now deadly calm. She understands the message, the warning. If she asks about the tattoo, he will ask why she recognizes it.

It’s not her business. There are not a lot of reasons that a man with an Imperial prison tattoo for a place like the Crypt would now be wearing an Imperial officer’s uniform. None of them are particularly good for Jyn.

“For what it’s worth,” Willix offers tightly into the silence. “I was only there a day.”

“For what it’s worth,” she replies in a brittle tone, hugging her arms tightly around her chest against the shivers, “I’m not judging you for it.”

A pause, and then, “You’re not judging me at least a little?” he asks carefully, the faint shadow of a smile back in the corner of his mouth.

“Well, your cooking isn’t that great,” Jyn snorts. “And your beard is evil.”

“My…beard?”

“But no,” she shrugs. “Not judging you at all.”

“I’ll have you know,” he replies, the smile definitely hovering in the corners of his mouth and the lines around his eyes, “that my cooking is excellent, given the proper materials.”

Jyn gives him an arch look, fighting to keep her own mouth from curving upward in an answering grin. “An excellent cook can make good food from anything,” she shoots back. “You’re an acceptable cook, at best.” She tenses slightly as she realizes she’s left herself open for a comment about her lack of gratitude, and even as a joke she knows she won’t enjoy it.

“No appreciation for skill,” is all he says, shaking his head and rubbing absently at his injured shoulder.

 The relief is stronger than she anticipates, and Jyn’s guard slips a little as she smirks at him. “Show me some skill, and I’ll appreciate it then.”

He coughs suddenly, bending his head and holding his good arm in front of his face. Jyn frowns. “You’re not getting sick, too. Are you?”

“No, no, fine,” he drops his arm and clears his throat, his face a little more red than a moment ago. “Swallowed the wrong way or…something.”

They lapse into silence, Willix fussing with his pack and Jyn rubbing her arms hard with her gloved hands. Her ears are starting to feel like chips of ice on either side of her head, which still aches a little. It’s manageable though, so long as she doesn’t crack it against anything for awhile. The real threat is the cold. She cautiously gets up and moves to the tunnel, sticking her head out into the darkness. Shit, it’s even colder out there, the little lamp must be doing more than she thought. If she tries to jog around out here, she’ll at best reach equilibrium, at worst waste a ton of energy with no survival value returned. Looks like she’s stuck in the little cavern for now.

“Hale,” Willix says from behind, wary and careful.

Jyn whirls around, her back tense. He hesitates, his hands buried in his jacket pockets again, his face grim. He seems to be working up to something, and Jyn has the faint idea she might know what it is. “Another tarp,” she blurts before he can speak. “We need to cover the entrance.”

“That would help, a little,” he agrees, frowning at the small opening behind her. “But I don’t have one.”

Well, shit. Nothing in her pack is going to work, either. She’s just going to be very, very cold. If she’s lucky, she won’t lose any fingers, toes, or bits of her face. If she’s unlucky…

“Hale,” Willix sighs. “This is our best option.” He shuffles to his knees and off the pile of tarp and blanket that he’s made, and gestures down at it. Behind him, the dark wall glitters with kyber stars, his shadow cast across them like the void between systems. He sets his pack at one end of the makeshift bed, the lamp at the other end, causing the kyber to ignite even brighter as he brings the light closer.

“It’s asking for a lot of trust,” he starts to say, his jaw set tight, “but – “

“Trust goes both ways,” she says softly, thinking of a blaster in her hand and plate of food in his.

Willix’s eyes darken, and he turns his face away for a moment, and then back to her, composed and calm again. “The temperature around here can fall below zero.” He catches himself and clarifies, “Zero on the Lothal standard scale, I mean. Cold enough to freeze living flesh in two or so hours if exposed.”

He’s right. She’s never going to make it with her body intact in that kind of cold, not in this stolen coat and her cheap, thin clothes. Not with these third rate boots. And definitely not if her head injury comes into play again, which can happen with concussions. Shite.

No choice. Again.

Jyn moves slowly across the five or so steps to his bedroll, and crouches beside him. “Try to kill me,” she says, her voice low and hard and loaded with all the certainty she can muster, “and I’ll tear you to pieces.”

“In seconds,” he agrees calmly, a hint of humor in his tone. Jyn looks at him sharply – had he _known_ she was listening, when he said that to Dalle? The sneaky son of a –

“If you attack or steal from me,” his voice is just as low as hers, intent, and cold as the ice around them. “I will kill you quickly.”

It shouldn’t be as big of a threat as hers, a swift death is always better than a painful, drawn out one, isn’t it? But Jyn shivers anyway, because she understands what he’s saying. If he decides she’s a threat, he will end her, immediately and without hesitation. She probably won’t even see it coming.

Fair enough.

She nods, and then begins to pull at the frozen laces of her boots. They have to move quickly, both of them shedding their boots and ice-crusted gloves, Willix reaching up to brush snow crystals that haven’t yet melted from the back of her hood, Jyn crunching a few crystals still caught in his furry collar between her fingers and tossing them off to the side. The cold bites into her feet and face and hands with ragged teeth, and Jyn doesn’t let herself think about it too hard as she burrows into Willix’s blankets, her feet towards the lamp, her head on his pack. He slides in right after her, and they both turn and press their backs together without a word. The lamp is warming against her feet, but not quite fast enough, and she impatiently tries to rub them together. It doesn’t quite work, and she gives up with a grumble. The blanket is a good one, catching and returning body heat, and Willix is a solid warmth against her back. He doesn’t shift and fidget like she does, which makes her every tiny movement somehow feel amplified and so much more restless than usual. She can’t help it, she’s still cold (although this is a huge improvement over sitting around in the exposed air of the cavern), and the hard floor digs into her bony hip and shoulder.

 _Comfort is a luxury for the peaceful_ , Saw reminds her, _not those charged with standing against evil_. Jyn opens her eyes and glowers into the dark to banish his image from behind her eyelids. She’s not standing against anything out here in this frozen pit except her own ignoble death. Saw’s old rules no longer apply. He gave up the right for his rules to apply to Jyn’s life, four years ago and counting.

The cave walls glitter before her. Jyn watches the light play across them for a moment, and then pulls the blanket up over her face. Its warmer under here anyway. Her body is beginning to relax slightly into the survivable temperature under the blanket, even if she’s still randomly shivering from time to time. Willix does the same, so she’s not embarrassed by it. Although she really doesn’t like how still he is, almost like he’s carved from stone back there while she shifts and adjusts. Well, her damn feet are still cold. Better than before, but cold.

She pulls her knees up a little higher, as much as she can without risking tugging the blanket off of him, and her feet brush against the backs of his calves. Willix makes a startled noise in his throat and jerks slightly at the contact.

“It’s just my feet,” Jyn scowls. “Relax.”

“That’s your feet?” He sounds incredulous. “I thought you put ice in the blanket.”

She turns her head as much as she can without putting any pressure on the bump behind her ear. “They aren’t that cold.”

“They are colder than a Hutt’s heart,” he growls.

Jyn purses her lips, and then slowly, carefully, pushes her feet back to touch the backs of his knees.

He breaks immediately into a long rapid stream of something that sounds vaguely like a Core world language, maybe Alderaani? Except the words are not quite right, more fluid and slurred than the standardized Alderaani she learned when she was a child (and hasn’t spoken since she was eight, so she can hardly be called an expert). She thinks she can pick a few words out here and there – _frozen...killer...buttons?_ Before she can make out anything more, her translator helpfully chimes in. _My mother’s lovable murder is a sweet_ [anatomical fallacy]. _Your foot is the causing of my ancestors to_ [anatomical fallacy] _shake in reaction to fried food._

The laugh bubbles up inside her, and Jyn clamps her teeth together and tightens her core muscles to suppress it. The tension makes her head hurt, though, so she forces herself to relax carefully. Willix stops sputtering when she tenses, but his legs shiver against her cold toes. She probably should pull them back, now that her joke is over. He’s so warm, though, and she’s tired. Tired of cold feet. Tired of the headache. Just tired in general, really, a bone deep exhaustion that perhaps has less to do with the crash and the fight and her immediate chilly predicament and more to do with, well, her whole life.

She sighs and starts to pull her feet away.

“Put them back,” Willix orders, his tone resigned.

“…what?”

“You have terrible circulation in your feet,” he grunts at her. “The lamp and the blanket won’t be enough. You losing a toe slows us both down. Put them back.”

She shouldn’t, but honestly? He really is warm.

“Okay,” she says slowly. And since the cold and the exhaustion and the head injury have clearly addled her beyond saving, she lets her tone turn sly and her face crack into a smile under the blanket, where it’s dark and safe and no one can see. “If you think you can deal.”

“I can deal with anything you can throw at me,” he rolls his shoulder back slightly and rocks her with the nudge. He must be feeling better, to have that range of motion.

“Don’t know about that,” Jyn unceremoniously shoves her cold feet back into the blissful warmth of his knees, curling her toes happily. He grunts but doesn’t move away, actually bringing his own legs up a little more to bend his knees around her. “If you can barely handle my feet, I’m not sure you could manage with the rest of me.”

Too late does she realize exactly how that sounds, and her face flushes. She clenches the blanket a little tighter over her head and wishes she could kick herself.

Willix, thankfully, doesn’t comment on her idiocy. He does give a long, drawn out, exaggerated, put-upon sigh. It’s so ridiculous, in fact, that it diffuses the embarrassment and relaxes the tension creeping down Jyn’s spine. “Impressive,” she says when he finally stops.

“You did say that if I showed you a skill, you would appreciate it,” he replies. “I see you’re a woman of your word.”

This time the laugh slips from her before she’s ready for it, and Jyn claps a hand over her mouth to cut it off. She thinks she feels his own back move a little, a suppressed laugh of his own, maybe, but by the time she’s composed herself, he’s as still as a statue once more.

Well, good. Better not to get too chummy with the man in a uniform, even if he’s got prison tats underneath. Only there for a day? What did that even mean? He broke out? Made a deal with the Imps? Or was he not a prisoner at all?

Not important. He isn’t going to kill her tonight, not if he’s using her for warmth against the killer temperature. And it is still plunging, she thinks, the heat lamp now fighting against what’s probably a truly murderous chill by her feet. The blanket, the tarp, the person at her back – all enormously helpful and much better than her other plan of hopping up and down all night. But this planet is out to kill them, she can feel it. Her knees at the edge of the blanket are cold, and her hands won’t quite warm up either, no matter how tight she clasps them to her chest.

There’s simply no way she’s going to sleep like this. But that’s alright, she isn’t planning to sleep anyway, she’s just going to curl under here and listen to the wind howling in the tunnels, a distant bellowing roar like some creature raging through the star-studded walls. It sounds a little like Saw, actually, his voice booming through grey Imperial walls as he leads his personal strike team into their most recent target, a base whose name she can’t remember now. Doesn’t matter. What matters are the Stormtroopers marching towards her down the long halls, their white boots striking the cold floors in unison. Saw roars like an angry mynock and charges forward, and Jyn is the swift death running in his shadow, blaster whining, blade sharp. Maia runs at her left, Saw on her right, Dektru’s repeater cannon sprays red-hot liquid plasma cross the advancing troopers’ front line and Magva trills her ululating battle cry.

They are running as one, a pack of bloodthirsty hounds racing towards their prey, and her blood sings in her veins as she goes. The troopers raise their weapons, red lights shriek and explode around her. Maia vanishes, fallen behind. Jyn runs. Detru’s gun stutters and fades, Magva’s trill crescendos to a scream, but Saw is still charging and Jyn runs at his side. The troopers march towards them, and as some fall other appear to fill the holes, relentless in their advance, the dark void trailing in their wake as they come. Jyn runs. The void glitters with cold stars that watch but don’t interfere as the red bolts shatter around her, over her, through her with streaks of freezing cold pain, but she doesn’t stop running. She can’t. Saw is gone and she is still running, running, can’t stop, can’t look back, hunger and cold and blood nip at her heels and she is alone now but she is still fast, still the swift death in the shadows, so she runs through them. The troopers march after her, their cold white hands reaching for her back, her neck, her throat where another star rests. Jyn reaches up and touches the crystal around her neck, and in the icy walls around her, Mama paces aside her, always running, too, until she stopped. Trust the Force, Jyn, she says anyway, as if that helps, as if it’s ever helped. (It has. She isn’t sure why.) Mama keeps running, but she’s drifting farther away into the walls, and Jyn angles closer in a desperate attempt to stay with her but she can’t pass through the ice. She can’t follow. _Come back_ , she yells, or tries to yell, but all her air is caught in her lungs, keeping her moving because she can’t stop. She has to keep running. She tries again anyway, _come back, please, don’t leave!_

I’m here, Mama says, but her voice is distant and fractured, echoing from far away and somewhere over her head. I’m here. It’s okay. Don’t be afraid.

Kyber flickers between them, Mama’s form fading away into the void between the crystal stars, away towards a man that Jyn tells herself is dead, hunched over a table with glowing datapads in his hands, greying hair pulled back and eyes so warm and loving and distant as the stars. Mama runs towards Papa, who is dead, he must be dead, because the only alternative is that he ran the other way, away from Jyn, away from stardust. Mama runs toward the little girl that Jyn can see curled up in the dark around a little lamp that flickers in and out, like a dying heartbeat. She’s alone, and though she’s sitting still, she’s already running. She didn’t know it at the time, but Jyn was already running, and she can never, ever stop.

I know, says the boy on the other side of the ice. I know. I’m sorry. I know what it’s like. He is small, the boy, small and dark and angry, hurtling stones at the Stormtroopers as they march ceaselessly behind her. Jyn looks at the boy and her stomach clenches, her heart tears, her lungs are too tight and she can’t breathe. She can’t breathe but she has to run.

You must learn to look without fear, Mama tells her softly, gently, in a tone that Mama almost never used. Open your eyes, my Stardust. Open your eyes.

Open your eyes, echoes the boy with the rocks quietly, but she doesn’t want to. It’s warmer now, she’s warm in the dark and the quiet. She’s finally stopped running, or at least paused for a moment, for a breath. She doesn’t want to open them and start again. She will. She has to, she knows it, and soon. But she doesn’t want to just yet. She burrows into the warmth and keeps her eyes stubbornly shut. Just this once. Just for now. Please.

Alright, he murmurs, alright. Rest. It’s alright. His breath is warm in her hair, almost as warm as the kyber star that blooms and grows in her belly. She wraps her hands around the star and hugs it tight to her body, curling into it, eyes shut against the cold and the ache in her head and the emptiness in her chest. She hugs it tight and rests.

She wakes up to a dim reflection of light in the cave walls, a startling warmth, and a very, very close and personal view of a man’s pulse in his throat. The little heater is nestled in the small space between their bodies, pressed against her stomach. Her legs and arms are twined with his, pinned down and pinning him in return. _A good grapple,_ she thinks blurrily, _can’t reach any of my knives like this_.

And then sanity hits her like a cold rush of ice water down her back and Jyn’s muscles lock as she wakes all the way up in a snap.

The blanket is still mostly pulled up over her head, and she can feel Willix’s breath against her hair, his nose practically buried in it. He tenses half a second after she does, his hands curling in her grasp where their arms and fingers are tangled together. Her knee is tucked firmly between his, a fact she recognizes probably at the same time he does when he flexes his thighs in startled discovery. He doesn’t jerk away or gasp, but his whole body goes from relaxed to statue-stiff in a single breath. If she weren’t just as startled, Jyn might laugh.

Slowly, he lifts his head away from hers, although he doesn’t try to move any of his limbs, doesn’t even let go of his hard grip on her fingers. Jyn waits a moment, and then tilts her chin up to look at him, hoping like hell he can’t see her pulse pounding in her throat the way she can see his. Around the edge of the blanket she can see that the cave is still mostly dark, perhaps a little more grey than purple, but the heat lamp tucked between them lights up the space under the blanket with a brilliant gold, and she can see his face perfectly in detail. He’s blinking rapidly and clearly struggling to get his mouth and eyes under control, but failing. Failing so miserably, in fact, that Jyn can feel an absurd sort of giggle bubbling up in the back of her throat, because shit, he looks so rumpled and surprised, it’s almost endearing.

“Hi,” she says with a sleep-rough voice. “This must be hell on your shoulder.”

He blinks again, and then squeezes his eyes shut tightly for a long moment. When he opens them again, he’s finally mastered his expression, looking down at her with only slightly sheepish calm. “Surprisingly not. The fracture must have already closed up.”

“Lucky you,” she muses, and lifts her head experimentally from the pack under her cheek. She’s probably got sleep lines from the water-treated canvas, but she’s much more concerned with the twinge of sharp pain that spikes across the back of her head. She grimaces and drops her cheek back down. That blow must have been much worse than she thought. Alright, well, at least she can blame some of her dumber, stranger actions lately on the head injury. That’s a mild comfort.

Willix clears his throat softly, and slowly tugs one of his hands free. Jyn immediately drops both of them, prepared to pull back and force herself out into the frigid air she can just feel on the other side of the blanket barrier. Willix recaptures her other hand immediately, though, stopping her. “I’d like to scan your injury again, please,” he says gravely.

Probably a good idea. And maybe it will grant her a few more minutes in the warmth before she has to get up and start figuring out how to get to the ship and ditch the Imperial and…

Jyn pushes her thoughts away before they turn dark and unpleasant. Just a couple more minutes. It’s been a long time since she’s been this warm. “Okay,” she murmurs, and watches through half-closed eyes as he deftly slips his free hand into the pack opening under their heads without even lifting his cheek. He rummages around under his own cheekbone for a moment, his face brightening when he finds what he’s looking for, and tugs the medical scanner free again. Jyn quirks an eyebrow at his triumph, and he holds it up between their faces for a moment before reaching around the back of her head.

Jyn finds herself staring at his throat again, from a very close vantage point. His short trimmed beard is starting to get a little scruffy around the edges, dark hair spreading down his neck and around the lines of his sharp jaw. She thinks she kind of prefers it this way, although that is of course a stupid line of thought to pursue. She doesn’t have a preference for Lieutenant Willix’s beard. That would imply that she has any opinion about his appearance in general, which she does not.

Well, alright, he has very nice eyes. Fair is fair.

“Hang on, I need a better angle,” he says softly over her head, and Jyn snorts a little.

“That’s what they all say,” she tells his throat, and grins when he huffs with exasperated humor.

“Very funny.” He untangles his other hand from hers and somehow twists his arm up and under her neck, his hand slipping to the back of her neck to gently press her head forward. The medical scanner hums and chimes softly behind her, and Jyn thinks idly that if Saw knew she was allowing a person she met a week ago – one wearing an Imperial uniform, no less – to have complete access to her head like this, he’d throw a fit. Well, Saw gave up his right to have opinions on who she trusted, even if it was only temporarily. So did her parents, for that matter, when they left too.

“You’re still in danger of relapse," Willix says, cutting into the increasingly bitter path of her thoughts. “You need to be treated through a decent medbay, at least. Ideally a full-service hospital.”

And just like that, Jyn’s drowsy, warm mood evaporates. “Yeah, sure,” she snaps, and rolls away from him, jerking her leg from between his and pushing the lamp off her stomach. The merciless cold of the cavern hits her like a hammer when she pulls out from under the blanket, but Jyn breathes through it, grabbing her boots where they lay just under the far edge of the blanket, where the lamp used to be. She tugs her hood up around her already stinging ears and stubbornly fights back against the shivers creeping up her spine. The cave is already brightening, albeit slowly. It’s morning, and from the lack of distant roaring, it sounds like the storm finally blew itself out. It should be safe to move, and once she gets moving, she’ll be fine.

“It’s not an insult,” Willix says mildly from where he’s still lying wrapped in the blanket. The light from the lamp filters up around the gap by his neck, making him look weirdly bright in the dim cavern. “Head injuries can be tricky, no matter how tough you are.”

He thinks she’s being a bravo. Jyn scowls at him and finishes lacing up her boots, curling her toes against the chill of the synth leather. “It’s not going to happen,” she tells him in her hardest, least inviting tone. Most people stop talking to her when she uses that tone, even the dullest of them recognizing a dismissal when they hear it. Willix is clearly not a dull wit at all, but he tilts his head and settles back in his blanket nest like he intends to lounge there all day.

“Why not?”

Jyn tugs her hood tighter around her face. “Why do you think, _Lieutenant?”_

“I didn’t say you should go to the Imperial facility here. Although that is an option, when you – when Siever sends that search party.”

This makes her turn to stare in astonishment. “Are you…serious?”

He sighs, rubs a hand over his face for a moment. “This is a remote outpost,” he tells her, his palm over his eyes. “The infirmary isn’t busy. They’ll likely make room for you without protest.”

“And charge me a thousand credits for the pleasure,” she shoots back, which is true but not her real concern. Imperials love records, they keep records for everything, probably can’t take a shit without someone marking it in a log somewhere. They won’t just give her some pills and a cot to sleep in, they’ll take blood samples and her whole sturdy but incomplete ident as Priya Hale, and fingerprints, signatures, holographs, _everything_. She might as well dial up the Emperor himself and shout _here I am, a fugitive from the glorious regime!_

He pushes out of the blanket nest with a reluctance she can understand, peeling away the blanket the way some people peel a bandage from an old wound, grimacing as he reaches for his boots. “The _Muunyak_ has a decent medbay, then.”

The hair on Jyn’s neck prickles; this is dangerous ground. She opens her mouth to agree, diffuse the argument and reaffirm that she is a valid member of Siever’s crew.

“No one’s going to waste those kinds of resources on me,” she says instead, like a moron. A complete and utter moron who let a little survival-snuggle turn her brain into mush.

He pauses with the blanket halfway folded and looks up at her.

Jyn turns and stares at the wall. It’s definitely turning grey now, and the kyber trapped inside looks once more like dull bits of rime ice, or rocks trapped in the smooth clear surface. Its long past time they were moving on from this spot. She needs a map. Maybe Willix can fix his little holomap, and she can figure out where this ship she’s picking up is relative to her position. If it’s close, maybe she doesn’t even need to go back to the mining base. She can hope, anyway.

“I am a very valuable asset,” Willix tells her quietly.

Jyn bristles, the words _bully for you, Imperial_ on the tip of her tongue. His tone stops her, though, and she glances back to find him looking at his hands with a mild distaste. He looks as if he’s found something filthy on the gloves he’s pulling back over reddened knuckles, but doesn’t want to rub it off lest he smear it. He meets her eyes and shrugs. “And that’s all.”

And she gets it. An _asset_. Willix is valuable only so long as he serves some purpose to his superiors, a tool to be used as necessary – and that’s all. If he walked into the Imperial infirmary on the mining base with a head injury, he’d probably get top priority and a dozen doctors hovering around him. And then he would walk back out and vanish into the void, and that would be the last any of them ever thought of him again.

She gets that.

He studies her face in the small silence that follows, and from the way he drops his shoulders and briskly completes his packing, she figures he sees her understanding well enough.

They don’t speak again, simply grab their packs and head into the tunnel. Willix takes the lead, his holomap flickering uselessly in his hand as he moves back up the tunnel towards the cave entrance. That’s likely where the rescue party – if they come – will look for the lost officer. It’s also the last place the holomap worked. Jyn doesn’t really like heading towards a place she knows will be crawling with alert Imperials, but there’s no other option. Aside from running blindly off into the tunnels, of course, but that’s suicide on a good day, and she’s not sure this one qualifies as even that. The dull ache in her head is back, although at least her vision is blessedly clear and there’s no more nausea. Not a good day, but not the worst she’s ever had.

So. Map. Possible pick up to the Imperial base, in which case she grabs some gear and slips out to the smuggled ship. Alternatively, there’s no rescue party, and Jyn…somehow gets a look at Willix’s map anyway, figures out where she’s headed, and slips away from him. Should be easier, getting away from one Imperial versus escaping a base full of them. She has the sinking suspicion that it really, really won’t be, though.

“Almost there,” Willix says as they pass through a pile of shattered ice chunks scattered across the tunnel. She recognizes them as pieces of the spikes they had broken to get farther into the cave. There seem to be more here than she remembers, but then she did have a –

Willix spits a word so venomously that it draws Jyn up short.

 _Fornicate_ , her translator supplies helpfully, a heartbeat later.

Ahead of them, a solid mass of ice and snow piles haphazardly in an immovable mass, sunlight only dimly slipping through a few slender cracks.

The opening is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is, of course, no such thing as a concussion pill, but I used something like it before and it makes for a decent handwave solution. For now. 
> 
> [The Crypt](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_Crypt_\(prison\)) was a pretty nasty Imperial prison in the outer reaches, black site and virtually unknown. A bad place to be, even for a day.
> 
> The heat lamp is also my invention, although such things do exist. I just refined it and made it much more convenient.


	4. The Pirates

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, this took ages and it's not even finished! But it is finished, and I will post the actual, no shit, really I mean it last part either later tonight or tomorrow. Life happened, and I was too exhausted in the in-between to get anything finished. I'm truly sorry, and it won't happen again.
> 
> Anyway, here's some more.

Jyn’s first thought is, of course, _fuck you, Ilum._

Her second is a semi-coherent mental half-scream of _not again, not again, not again, please not again!_ She shakes that off in a hurry, though. Compartmentalize. Survive first, relive childhood trauma later. _Death takes the slow_ , Saw bellows in her memory ( _and it doesn’t look kindly at the stupid, either_ , she’s learned). She finds herself listening intently - there are Imperials out there, right? Marching over the cold ground, searching for her. _We’ll be safe in this little cave, stardust, safe and together, I promise_ , except they weren’t, neither safe nor together and Jyn’s heart is beginning to hammer in her chest now, the air is too thin and too cold and she is not safe at _all_ , he lied, he lied _, please not again_ -

And then Willix grabs her arm so tight that her elbow immediately aches, and all her thoughts derail into a wordless kaleidoscope of fear, anger, confusion, and surprise. She yanks her arm, automatically trying to rip free from his hand, but his grip is so painfully tight that she barely moves. Jyn whirls to face him, free arm raised to knock his teeth in –

And stops short.

Willix has gone grey, his lips thinned to a rigid line, his eyes wide. He’s staring at the caved in wall with such rigid blankness that she’s not entirely sure punching him would even register. “Hey,” Jyn says hesitantly.

No response.

“You in there?” She tries again. His fingers flex on her arm, his jaw twitches, and then he blinks and turns to look at her. Abruptly, his face goes completely, utterly empty. His jaw relaxes, his eyes drop half-shut, his features become distant and motionless. Jyn has seen store mannequins in wealthy city shops that looked more animated. It’s creepy, and made worse by the fact that he’s still a bit colorless around the edges, his skin ashen and his eyes dark. And he’s still gripping her elbow hard enough to bruise, though she’s got the impression he hasn’t noticed yet.

“No exit,” he says in that nothing-voice from before, the cold Imperial making an observation with no inflection, no hint of what the man underneath might think.

Jyn lifts her free hand again, slowly and carefully reaching for his face. He watches with the unblinking eyes of a snake, remote and uninterested. She traces her fingertips delicately up his jawline, skimming over the rough stubble beginning to blur the crisp lines of his goatee, lets her palm hover so delicately against his cheekbone that her thin glove only just barely scrapes the skin, and flicks his ear as hard as she can.

He jolts, his head snapping away as he drops her arm and steps back. His hand flies up to rub his ear, and he scowls at her. “Stop _doing_ that!”

“Feel that?”

“Yes, of course I - ”

“Not your kriffing ear,” she snaps, cutting him off with more edge than she really means, trying hard not to look at his rueful expression and animated eyes. “ _That_.”

When he squints at her, confused (but not blank, _troac varbeck_ , at least he’s not fucking blank and empty and Imperial), she snorts impatiently and tugs a thin lock of her hair from under her hood, letting it drift in the gentle breeze. Willix watches for half a second with his brows furrowed, but she gives him credit for his recovery skills, because the light comes on in his eyes almost instantly.

“Breeze,” he says, dropping his hand and turning his back on the caved-in opening. “There’s air flow in here.”

“That way,” Jyn points, and walks off before she has time to think about how easily her own fear broke in the face of his. Before she has time to consider why she would even care about his fear. It’s way more important to focus on their tenuous lifeline out of this frozen trap, the light breeze winding up from the far left tunnel they had shunned earlier. Without the strong gusts from the storm outside, she can now feel the faint whisper of chilled air coming from the rough-hewn tunnel, tugging her further down and into the glittering ice cave that she’s beginning to suspect isn’t entirely a natural formation. Some sort of buried ruin, full of kyber crystals and old dreams…

Ugh. Now she’s getting _poetic._ Stupid head injury.

Willix follows her irritable slogging without a word, the next several minutes of uncomfortable silence broken only by the crunch of their boots on shattered ice. Jyn resolutely keeps her mouth shut and her eyes forward, thinks only about the pace of her breathing and the stir of wind brushing her cold-reddened skin. She’s rewarded about fifteen minutes later when he breaks the silence first. “I’m sorry,” he says. “For my reaction at the entrance.” He catches her eye with a stony, uncomfortable look and grimaces slightly. “I don’t care for…”

He trails off, shakes his head slightly, and she almost lets is drop, pretends he didn’t speak at all, as he clearly means to do. Instead, she finds herself reaching up and lightly tapping her fingertip against his back, just below his shoulder blade, where a reddish semi-scar marks out a half-removed tattoo. “Prisons?”

The grimace deepens before he smooths is away. “Yes.”

“Makes sense.”

She says it perhaps a little too dismissively, because Willix bristles. “And yours?”

The tunnel opens up abruptly into a huge chamber spreading out to their left, a frozen lake of some kind with various dripping stalactites looming over the smooth, apparently solid blue-white surface. But Jyn can see some of those heavy stalactites have fallen recently, stabbing through the shell of lake ice like huge blades and leaving long, ragged cracks spiderwebbing across various patches of it. A treacherous crossing, despite the deceptive thickness of the surface. Fortunately, more tunnels branch off to the right, and she can still feel a chilled but soft breeze whispering through the tunnels. “My what?” She asks, distracted by the sight, and the question of which tunnel to take.

“I saw your face,” Willix replies in a tone too careful to be neutral. “You were just as…unhappy…as I. What’s your reason? What were you thinking of, when we found the entrance blocked?”

(In the back of her head, a wordless wail _. Not again. Not again.)_

“What the hells do you think, arsehole?” she snarls, her back prickling and her head beginning to ache. A knife of fear stabs through her guts as she speaks, a distant instinct muttering urgently that it is dangerous to tell an Imp what you really think of them, dangerous to speak against the glory of Empire. But Jyn is tired and cold and lost, so she grabs that knife and turns it into a weapon. “That I was trapped in a fucking cave with a snot-brained son of a bantha bitch boga-fucking _Imperial officer.”_

“No,” he shakes his head, has the _gall_ to shake his head. “You weren’t.”

That sentence knocks her so off balance that she damn near stutters in anger, “ _No?_ So, what, I’m _not_ standing here in frozen hell staring at your ugly fucking face, Imperial?”

“You weren’t thinking about me at all,” he snaps back, the lines around his mouth drawing tight with anger and stress, his eyes darker than the shadows of the ice cave. They are deep underground now, she thinks a touch wildly, deep enough that she shouldn’t be able to see him as clearly as she does. She shouldn’t be able to pick out the tension in his sharp jawline, nor the faint line of tiny scars that mar his hairline near his right temple – it’s not that she’s looking, it’s just that he’s…he’s…

Too close. Looking at her too intently. Looking through her, past Priya Hale to _her_. He’s too close, Force damn him, and from the gleam in his eye, he knows it too. He sees it at the same time she does, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t back down, and she can’t either because that’s weakness, that’s softness, that’s admitting that he’s right. She can’t let him know that he’s right, that what he’s so accurately spotted in her is real. 

“Back _off_ , Imperial,” she hisses, the blood thrumming in her head, pulsing through the tender spot on the back of her skull, _too close, too close, too –_

“ _Stop calling me that!”_

His voice lashes at her like a whip, cracking with compressed fury and something like desperation. Jyn shies back a step, the thrumming in her head knocked off kilter with surprise and a familiar flash of fear and anticipation mixing in her gut. Battle reaction. If he had stayed where he was, or leaned forward to crowd her more, she might have launched herself at his throat on pure instinct. But the viciousness of his own words seems to knock him just as sideways as her, and Willix stumbles back a step, shaking his head and holding up a hand between them. She glances at his gloved palm and wonders vaguely if he’s warding her off or trying to apologize. Maybe both.

Doesn’t matter. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t have a reason to care.

They stand in silence for several long, dark seconds, broken by their equally ragged breathing and the thrum, thrum, thrumming of blood in her head.

She shouldn’t ask. It isn’t her business to ask. She doesn’t _care_.

His eyes are very, very dark, and not entirely focused on her now, turned inward and shadowed in a way that has nothing to do with the cave’s lack of light.

Jyn swallows, and asks. “Why not?”

Willix closes his eyes, exhales slowly. When he opens his eyes again, it’s the blank mask, the indifferent Imperial officer. “The ground inclines in that direction,” he jerks his chin towards one of the branching paths nearby. “We move closer to the surface, the map should lock in with the satellites again, and we can find the path.”

Jyn nods. “Yeah,” she says, and watches the relief slacken his tense shoulders as she lets it go. “Sure.”

She has to ditch him, soon.

But how?

 

* * *

 

“Here,” he says, roughly an hour later, stopping abruptly and yanking his pack from his back. Jyn walks another few steps down the dim tunnel before she registers the change in pace, and she turns to stare at him in puzzlement as he suddenly leans against the ice wall and plops down into a cross-legged pose.

“What are you doing?”

“Brief rest,” he waves at the frozen ground next to him, as if he’s inviting her to take up the vacant bar stool next to him at the local cantina. Jyn glares at him, but he’s fishing around inside his pack and doesn’t notice.

“We’ve barely moved from the entrance,” she protests, keeping up the glare for the principle of it.

Willix shrugs one shoulder noncommittally and pulls the heat lamp free, popping it open and flicking it on again. “You in a rush, Hale?” Once the heat lamp buzzes and lights up in his hands, he glances up at her through his eyelashes. “And here I thought you were enjoying the pleasure of my company.”

Jyn hesitates, and then lets the glare drop into a slightly exaggerated flat stare. “I’m just concerned about your stamina,” she says, and smirks when his hands fumble the lamp for a brief second.

“I manage,” he replies at last, keeping his eyes on the lamp as he sets it down next to his thigh.

“I’ve seen better,” she shoots back, and then gives in, settling herself down next to him. Next to the heat lamp, rather. Because if he’s going to slow them up, she might as well be warm. Warmish. Whatever.

“You’re wasted in the hauling business,” Willix mutters. “Clearly you were meant to be a comedian.”

“Nah,” Jyn folds her arms and balances them on her knees, carefully watching him fish around in his bag because it was important to watch his hands. For safety reasons. He could be about to pull a weapon on her, or something. “Doesn’t pay well enough.” She’s about to say more, crack some joke about her humor being too good for the low-brow crews she usually runs with, but he finds what he’s looking for and pulls it out. Jyn grimaces. “Again?”

“Head injuries are tricky, and stubborn,” he brandishes the medical scanner at her remorselessly. “I’d like to know if you’re about to drop on me.”

“What difference would it make?” Jyn realizes that she’s hunching her shoulders defensively, and forces them back down again. “The pills only work so much, and you’re low on bacta.”

“I have enough,” he replies mildly, and holds the scanner up. “Just a quick scan, alright?”

She scowls at him, eyes narrow, and doesn’t lean closer. To his credit, he’s smart enough not to reach out and try to grab her, instead holding the scanner up patiently in her line of sight. A long, silent moment passes between them, and Willix sighs and lets his hand drop a fraction. “Look, Hale, I don’t relish the idea of trying to carry your delirious backside out of these caves-”

“You won’t,” she cuts him off sharply, but he misses her meaning, or ignores it, and simply shakes his head again.

“If you collapse, it will be extremely difficult to get you through some of these narrower openings, and I won’t be –“

“ _So leave me_.” Now it’s her voice that slices through his words, cutting him off sharply. Jyn winces internally, though she fights to keep her face hard and angry rather than show any of the brittle pain that lances through her when she snarls at him. “If I fall,” she manages after a moment, too angry to be proud at how level she sounds, “then you dump me.”

“Hale – “

“I’m not stupid. I know how it fucking goes, Im-” The word _Imperial_ hovers on the end of the sentence, but she swallows it back at the last second, clamping her jaws together and refusing to acknowledge the spike of pain lancing through the back of her head as she does.

Willix’s eyes widen, then narrow.

Jyn matches his glare and waits.

Slowly, he shifts the scanner to his other hand, and she expects him to tuck it back into the bag in his lap. Instead, he flips it around and holds it out to her, handle first. “No.”

She blinks at him, because…what?

“What?”

“I said,” Willix repeats in a patient tone that would be utterly obnoxious if she weren’t so surprised, “ _No_. Now take the fucking scanner, Hale. Run it yourself if you can’t stand the idea of me touching you. But run it.”

Jyn looks down at the scanner. A newer model, not Imperial issue that she knows of, civilian. Decent. Relatively cheap, but decent.

She reaches for it, then drops her hand. “Fine,” she mutters, and shuffles on her knees until she’s facing him fully. She bows her head and glares at his knee, just past the glow of the heat lamp. “ _Fine,”_ she repeats, a little louder, prodding his thigh impatiently with one finger.

 Willix hesitates, but he’s a smart man and he reads her message quickly enough. “Okay,” he says softly, shifting onto his own knees and turning to face her too, the lamp once again perched between them and illuminating their bodies. Jyn keeps her head bowed and doesn’t dare look up at his face as he reaches for her head, her neck. His gloved hands are cold and ice-rimed, and when he touches her Jyn flinches out of instinct.

Willix curses and yanks off his gloves. His skin isn’t much warmer, but his fingers aren’t freezing and sharp-edged with ice flakes as he pushes her head a little further down and holds the scanner a few centimeters behind her skull. In fact, when he slides the pads of his fingers into the hair at the nape of her neck, gently dragging some of the strands aside, she finds her eyes drifting closed. The memory of this morning’s warmth surges back up inside her, and she could swear she hears the soft echoing voice of…of…her mother, yes, that must be who it is. If only she could remember what Mama said to her. Not _trust the Force, Jyn_ , she remembers that perfectly, syllable for syllable, burned into her heart along with _Stardust_ and _death takes the slow, my child_. No, no, this is something else. Something about fear, and seeing, and maybe even a boy who threw rocks at the marching ‘troopers while she ran.

The scanner beeps, and Willix sets it aside, his other hand still holding her head forward gently, fingertips buried in her hair. “A little more, alright?” And she opens her eyes enough to see him popping open the bacta tube with his thumb, reaching up again, and the soft sensation of more fingers brushing through her hair. It hurts, the dull throb of someone pressing on a bruise, but it’s also…

He’s so careful, holding her. Not ginger, but gentle. She can’t remember the last time anyone touched her with gentleness.

Fire and fuck. She really _does_ need her head examined, in more ways than one.

“You could have,” she starts, and then stops, because there are a lot of things he could have done. Maybe should have done.

“You too,” he replies, just as quiet.

She sighs, and lets her eyes close for a moment longer. Just a moment.

He sweeps his fingers down the back of her head, her neck, and then drops his hands.

“Okay,” he says after a beat, his voice not quite as stable as before. He clears his throat and tries again. “Okay. All done.”

“Satisfied?” Jyn asks, lifting her head and attempting to smirk at him. It doesn’t quite take, though, she just doesn’t have the energy for it, so it feels less sardonic and more…sad. Tired.

“As I will ever be,” he replies, in the exact same tone.

He stows the bacta, the scanner, the heat lamp. They get up without a further word.

The tunnel seems darker now, as they push further along the slight incline, but she isn’t sure if that’s a product of going deeper into the caves, or just her imagination. It’s not a threatening darkness, at least, but it does make the mineral stones embedded in the walls seem to glow slightly, catching what little light bounces around in here and gleaming from the clear, if rough, ice walls.

Jyn doesn’t know how to think about…whatever just happened. So she refocuses on the biggest problem at hand. She has to leave him behind, somehow.

He claimed that he wouldn’t leave her, but she knows better than to trust that.

And it’s not like she has a choice.

The tunnel narrows down, jagged icy sheets pressing in on all sides, and Willix stretches his legs to walk in front of her when it’s too narrow to walk side by side anymore. Jyn watches the back of his neck warily, but he doesn’t flinch even when her boot catches the back of his heel, even when she deliberately stumbles and catches herself against his shoulder-blades temporarily. If he were really ignoring her, those things would startle him, at least make him stumble a little. His complete lack of reaction to her little tests tells her that he is paying very, very careful to her every movement while she is out of his sightline. If she tries to stall, hang back, maybe drift down one of the small branching paths they occasionally cross, he will notice before she’s more than a couple steps away. So, no sneaking off.

Briefly she considers just stopping. Crossing her arms and telling him she’s done with him, _kriff off, I’ll go my own way_. And if he tries to talk her out of it, she can hurl several more insults that will surely anger him enough to walk off in disgust. She already knows at least one that he hates; by accident or design, he’s exposed a weak spot to her, and all she has to do is jam the verbal blade into it. _Imperial._ That word hurts him, or her tone when she says it does, or something. His reasons don’t matter. It would be the easiest way to be rid of him. Most efficient. Probably the best.

But.

Well.

She feels weirdly reluctant to do it, her gut twisting when she tries to picture his face. And Jyn has long ago learned to listen to her gut, so she sighs and shakes her head and pushes those harsh words away, hunting for some other, better solution.

She only comes up with one more, and it’s not necessarily… _better_. The blaster he gave her presses against her hip bone with cold finality, and no matter how closely he’s paying attention, there’s no way he could whip around and shoot her before she got at least one shot off at his exposed back.

If the thought of chasing him off with insults makes her gut twist, the thought of shooting him in the back makes her genuinely sick.

Or maybe it’s just the stupid head injury again. He’s a gods-be-damned _Imperial officer_. At the least, he’s wearing their uniforms and using their codes and expecting a rescue team from their base. That’s close enough. Right? Ahead of her, the path pinches down so narrow that Willix has to turn sideways to slide through the gap before it opens back up to a reasonably sized tunnel again. Jyn does the same, ignoring the glance he throws over his shoulder at her as he turns back towards the inclined tunnel. She reaches out and drags her gloved fingers absently against the rough ice wall as she passes, catching the faint gleam of uneven kyber stones embedded in the rime ice as she squeezes through.

Faintly, in the back of her aching head, she thinks she hears the whisper of a woman’s voice, muffled but familiar. Learn to…learn to see? Something about looking, or seeing, and something about fear. The voice sounds (or feels) like…like…Mama? Or maybe not, maybe the words are rougher, lower, an accented whisper into her hair while she huddled close for warmth. The words slip and fumble in her memory, vaguely she thinks, _but that was just a dream_ , and the words fall a little farther from her grasp. Look at her fear? Face her fear? No, no, that wasn’t quite…

Shit. Jyn pushes through the gap and folds her arms, taking care not to brush any more against the kyber-studded walls. The stone around her neck digs into the hollow of her throat, and she shrugs her shoulders to resettle the jacket pinning it there. The stone shifts away, and the faint murmur fades from the back of her mind. Jyn resolutely ignores it. It was just a dream, and anything said in a dream is nonsense and wishful thinking.

In reality, there is just no way an Imperial officer is going to let her fly away with a ship full of stolen Imperial goods. Even if he’s a bad officer, even if he’s into some shady bantha shit out here in the cold. There is no kriffing way he will stand there and watch her steal from the Empire and not do anything about it. She _has_ to get rid of him, and he’s not going to let her walk away.

The blaster digs into her hip again as she steps over a particularly high pile of snow clumped in the middle of the tunnel. Ahead of her Willix, glances back again almost as if it’s instinct, just long enough to make sure she cleared the obstacle. He catches her eyes, nods almost absently, and turns his back to her again.

He could have let her freeze to death last night. It wouldn’t have taken long. He just had to stay awake long enough to make sure she didn’t kill him for his gear, and she would have probably been dead in a couple hours. He could have let the pirates kill her, or the head injury. He could have left the Talz to burn under the shuttle’s rubble.

Jyn reaches down and grips the blaster. Readjusts it so it won’t press so hard against her hip. Folds her arms again.

She’ll just have to drive him off. Better yet – piss him off. Make him think that their separation was his own idea, so he won’t bother to look for her. And once she’s up near the surface, she can bring up her own (cheaper, much less detailed and useful) holomap, find this stupid hidden ship, and finally be done with this banthashit job.

Jyn takes a long, slow breath, lines up the words like blaster bolts in her head, and opens her mouth.

Willix freezes in his tracks, nearly causing her to crash into his back.

 _I haven’t even started yet_ , she thinks a touch wildly, confused and off-kilter. Then her ears pick up what he has already heard. Voices, echoing faintly down from the other end of their steadily inclining tunnel. The faint clang of metal. The whine of a small spacecraft engine.

Jyn reaches up and taps Willix’s rigid shoulder. “The base?”

He reaches into his coat and pulls out the holomap. It crackles for a moment, and then springs into clarity in the cold air over his palm. The red webbing indicating the Empire’s mining base is still several klicks to the east and above them. Too far from their green location indicator to coincide with the source of the noises ahead.

It does, however, coincide perfectly with the glowing yellow dot.

Jyn squints at the dot, but Willix snaps the map off almost as quickly as he pulled it up. “No,” he murmurs darkly. “Not Imperial.”

It only takes her a moment to connect the dots – there aren’t a lot of other options it could be.

“The pirates,” she sighs.

“They must have a base here. Bold of them, this close to the mining site.”

“And this close to the Destroyers.”

“Exactly,” he agrees, shaking his head. “They’re probably a smaller branch of a larger criminal organization. Some crew chief hoping to advance their branch’s standing with the big boss by grabbing something valuable from such a high security planet.”

Jyn snorts, matching her tone to his. “Idiot.”

“If we’re lucky,” Willix flashes her a brief half-smile that absolutely does _not_ send a faint flush of warmth through her chest, “an exploitable idiot.”

“Right,” she catches herself smiling back, and turns away from the humor crinkling the corners of his eyes until she’s certain it has faded. “Probably have a ship or something we can grab.”

“Right,” he echoes, and his voice suddenly sounds strained around the edges. Jyn turns back sharply to look at him, but he’s already turning away, his back to her once again as he strides down the narrow tunnel.

They don’t have to go much farther before the sounds of voices, equipment, and ships begin to fill the air, mixed with the ever-increasing roar of building winds. The light changes, too, growing almost painfully bright within the white translucent walls. An _opening_ , Jyn realizes, of course the pirates would bunker down somewhere with a large enough opening to fly their ships in and out of the cave. She’s proven correct a few minutes later, when Willix suddenly darts to the side and crouches in the snow. Before she drops to her own knee, Jyn sees the end of their tunnel snake unevenly out into a spacious cavern of some kind, with sunlight streaming in from the side and glinting off numerous small silvery spaceships. They look like the same ships that went screaming overhead the crashed shuttle, battling in and out of snowclouds with TIE fighters. She wonders briefly if the asshole who shot them down is sitting in that cavern now.

The end of the tunnel is partially obscured by haphazardly stacked crates, which Willix and Jyn shuffle up behind and peer carefully around for a moment, before dropping back down and leaning their heads together.

“Same pirates,” Willix murmurs.

“About twenty left,” she agrees. “Six ships.”

Willix’s frown deepens, and he squints over the crates towards something in the back of the cave, away from the yawning opening. “Seven ships,” he murmurs, more to himself than to her. She would dismiss it, except his expression immediately shifts, his eyes widening before he throws a lightning-fast glance at her. If she wasn’t watching his face already, if she hadn’t been watching it perhaps a little more closely than she cares to admit, she would have missed the expression, he hides it away so fast. But she is watching (even if she’s not thinking too hard about why), so she does see it. Jyn flexes her jaw and remembers the look on his face in the snow, when Waxna had been draped like so much dead weight over their shoulders. When he had been thinking about leaving them behind.

Without warning, she shivers. Jyn grits her teeth and fights back against the need to do it again, and tells herself not to look at Willix anymore. What, is she surprised by the revelation? _Of course_ he’s going to leave her behind. That’s the best case scenario, isn’t it?

Focus, idiot. The expression on his face, that flash in his eyes before he masked it – _recognition._ _Seven ships_ , he said. Something about the seventh, then, has set him guarded and more on edge than before.

She peers around the crates herself, sidling forward to get an eye around the open corner of the obstacle. In the back of the cave, she can just make out…

Dark grey hull, angular profile, distinct black and red markings on the stabilizers. Shit. It’s an Imperial Delta T-3. Charlie model, she thinks, although it’s hard to confirm from this distance and angle. She’s heard of those, seen a couple holoimages, because it pays to keep on top of the high-end ship trade, even if she doesn’t work that sector. Those things are built for stealth and speed, and they are new, rare, and expensive. Worse, they are typically only handed to higher-ranking Imperial officials. She tilts her head to get a better look at the registry down the side and, yeah, there it is, the exact registry code she came here for. That’s it, that’s the ship she’s meant to just fly right out of Ilum’s atmo, right past three Star Destroyers and fuck knows how many TIE fighters. With nothing but whatever pass codes the mystery former Rodian agent left inside and her natural charm, apparently.

 _Shit on a cracker_ , the ship alone is a major prize and a _huge_ liability; what the fuck did the Rodians hide on there that could possibly be worth stealing such a valuable ship from the Empire to get it? No wonder they couldn’t get anyone to agree to the job. No wonder they hadn’t bothered to mention this particular salient detail to her when she took the offer. No wonder the bigger Rodian had glared and the smaller one had twitched when she accepted so readily. Jyn must be the biggest idiot this side of Corellia to have taken this job without checking the ship registry first.

And she still doesn’t know what the actual _cargo_ is.

Well.

The cargo is not her problem, when she gets down to the brass tacks of it.

Right now, _her_ problem is how the hells she’s going to get to that ship without an Imperial officer on her heels, fire it up without being immediately murdered by two dozen pirates, and fly it out of the system without being blown to tiny pieces by Star Destroyers.

In the back of her mind, a booming voice laughs, _this job is_ **_wiggled_**.

Okay. First things first. She needs to get out of this side-tunnel and away from Willix. Jyn takes care to keep her face as neutral as she can, aware that if _she_ is close enough to see him deliberately hiding something, then _he_ is by default close enough to see the same in her. “Hey,” she grates under her breath, her words covered by some loud argument between nearby pirates. “Got an idea.”

In response, he loops his arm around her waist and jerks her hard against his side. Jyn almost rips herself back – he’s going to dump her any second now and if she’s _lucky_ that’s all he’ll do – but at the last second she freezes, recognizing the tread of heavy boots on snow, the crescendo of a distant voice coming closer. So instead she huddles into his body, crowding him against the icy wall and the cold metal crates, and ducks her head down as low as she can. Willix allows her close, practically hauling her in to pack them both as out-of-sight as possible behind their shoddy cover. His breathing slows, so careful and precise that if she weren’t pressing against his ribcage, she probably wouldn’t be able to tell he was breathing at all. Jyn slips her hand to her blaster hilt and concentrates on slowing her own breath, deep and silent. _Nothing here_ , she thinks firmly. _Just shadows and ice. Stay on that side of the crates. Nothing is here._

 “-needs to give up, man,” one of the arguing pirates walks towards their crates, talking over her shoulder as she approaches. Her voice is heavy with some Outer Rim accent, but she speaks in Basic. “That thing is just never to be open. If we blow the hatch, we get the goods.”

Her fellow pirate shouts something back in a tongue that buzzes and scrapes, and Jyn’s stupid translator whirs in her ear as it fights to process the distant voice. _Our Captain wants the ship too, laser brain_ , it whines in her ear, giving her the sudden urge to flinch and rub at the side of her head. ( _Our the Captain wants [specific singular] vessel as also_ , _one with a_ _condensed light cranial_ is actually what her translator says, but Jyn’s getting better at inferring the real translation.)

 _The cargo is just as valuable as the ship_ , second pirate buzzes again, _and our captain knows her shit._ ( _It is of valuable more than unknown bantha-shit cargo inside,_ buzzes her translator helpfully _, and also our the Captain has knowledge of [excrement/female implied].)_

Jyn scowls and presses her ear against Willix’s shoulder, just in case the tinny translator speaker is at all audible to the pirate on the other side of the crate. Some species have amazing hearing, and she doesn’t want this one to pick up on the obnoxious, poorly coded buzz of her piece of shite device. She really needs to upgrade, and soon.

Fortunately, at least for now, the translator doesn’t give her away. “Six feckin’ days, we still haven’t got the feckin’ door open,” the first pirate mutters, rifling through one of the poorly stacked crates just inches from Jyn’s head. “Barely got anything but the Imp scraps and the useless ship as can’t be opened.” She hisses something that sounds like a curse in a tongue neither Jyn nor her crappy translator recognize, and then, thankfully, shuffles away from the crates again. “Runnin’ low the booze, too,” she grumbles, before her voice fades to a distant murmur and Jyn can’t pick out the words anymore.

A shift of weight against her side, a rush of warm air by her cheek. “Plan?” Willix breathes into her hair, and Jyn grits her teeth despite the headache to stop the shiver from running down her spine again. There would be no way to hide it, not pressed as she is against him. Not with his arm around her waist, holding her tightly to his side like she matters to him (she doesn’t, he just didn’t want the pirate to see her over the edge of the crates, it’s survival _only_ and she knows this. She _knows_ ).

Still…it’s warmer, here. A little. And safer, with enemies standing just a few steps away. So Jyn doesn’t shove him off, doesn’t scramble over to the other side of their cover. She twists her neck to look up at him, and shrugs slightly. “Closest ship to the cave opening,” she whispers.

She feels him shift his weight again; he presses up on his toes just enough to peer through a small slit between the crates, eyeing the hanger beyond their hiding spot, and then settles back again. He turns his head to peer down at her, which puts them almost nose to nose, a fact that she sees Willix recognize when his eyes widen a fraction and his jaw tenses. She twists her head away immediately, feels him do the same, and her body suddenly is stiff and uncertain inside the curve of his arm. She does not blush, though. Or pull away. That would be a stupid, silly reaction. She’s been closer to people than this. She was closer to _him_ just a few hours ago, for fuck’s sake, her legs twined between his, her face brushing the hollow of his throat. There are more layers between their bodies right now than there were not three hours past. She has no excuse to be shuddering and flinching at his every tiny twitch.

So she grits her teeth and keeps her face calm and her body still, and gets at least three solid, steady breaths in before Willix leans his head down again and breathes softly into her ear _again gods damn it._ “Can you fly an RZ-3?”

Jyn ignores the warmth in her ear (it helps that the bitter cold of the cave is significantly worse for a brief second after he stops speaking), and rifles through her mental index of various spacecraft. The RZ fighters are a…single person light craft, right? Old school model, the newer versions mostly used as a fighter by…shit, by small time merchant fleets and pirates. She squints through the crates herself for a moment, and now that she knows the name, she recognizes the silvery little fighter craft as a type of older A-wing fighters, the kind that the Empire hasn’t used in a decade or so but used to be pretty popular in their time. She’s never flown an RZ-3 specifically, but she knows the base layout of that class of craft. She can probably manage it.

Not that she will need to, it suddenly occurs to her. She has to take another second to breathe deep and force her heartrate to slow before he feels the sudden jolt in her chest. He’s just suggested the _perfect fucking way_ to lose him without having to put her vibroblade into his back, and she didn’t even have to prompt him or manipulate him into it. They can’t both fit in one of those fighters; he will have to run for one while she pretends to run for another. Except, of course, she’ll be aiming a bit farther back, towards the ominous angular shape of the Imperial shuttle. He’ll probably take off long before she gets in the air, so he’ll be gone before she gets out of the cave. He won’t see where she went – probably won’t even bother to look back as he escapes.

She shakes her head at the bitter flavor of that last thought, and wonders where it came from. “I can fly one. Good enough to get out.”

“Good enough to get back to the mining base?”

She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t swallow hard, doesn’t do anything to betray her intentions. “Sure.”

A pause, and over her head, she feels him nod. “Good. Then we’ll grab one each. Meet back at the landing pad. The base will send TIE as escorts as soon as they see us. If you transmit my codes…” another pause, and then Willix grabs her wrist with his free hand, the other still wrapped tight around her waist. Which was probably not necessary any more, but Jyn doesn’t shake him free.  “Here.” Her comm beeps softly, a tiny sound that feels dangerously loud even with the banging and loud chatter of the hangar to drown it. On the comm, she sees a scroll of codes go by. Imperial codes, probably his officer ident attached to his badge. Those would get her on the mining base, alright. Of course, she’d be arrested shortly thereafter, as soon as someone ran her through their medical database. But he doesn’t need to know that. He’ll never need to know that.

Jyn pulls her wrist back to her chest, and doesn’t think about the lingering warmth of his gloved hand. “Split up,” she whispers softly.

“Harder for them to stop two craft taking off that far apart,” he agrees, following her reasoning.

“You head for the northern end of the cave, I’ll take southern.”

“Try for synched launch in thirty minutes.”

Jyn leans her head up to meet his eye one more time. “Twenty.”

His eyebrow quirks up, and those faint traces of humor crinkle around his eyes again. “Southern end is further away. You can make that in twenty?”

 _No, but you won’t have time to wait around for me_ \- but all she says out loud is, “Sure.”

“Impressive,” he murmurs. He tilts his chin down a little further, and the better angle gives her a perfect, up-close view of the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. She finds herself staring into his dark eyes and for some stupid, dangerous, pointless reason, she remembers exactly what his body felt like tangled around hers, the warm light of the lamp pressed between them like a star pulling two planets in orbit.

If she lifted her chin a fraction higher, rocked just a few inches to the side against him, stretched her toes up just the smallest bit, she could press her lips against his. And in that exact moment, looking up at his face, she knows that he would let her. He sees it too, this small, fragile thing that is not quite formed between them but is vast with coiled _potential._ She could do it. She wants to do it.

He’d known her the moment he saw her. He’d looked at her once and _known_ that she was up to something, just as surely as she’d known that there was more behind his languid, passive mask as soon as she clamped eyes on him. He’d marked her as a survivor, a fighter, without ever seeing her throw a punch. He’d seen her head injury even when she struggled to hide it. Whatever else he was, whomever else he was, he was far too sharp, too smart for her to fool.

If she kissed him right now, he would know something was up. If she kissed him, he would know it for what it was: gratitude, regret, _goodbye._

“Hey,” Jyn says softly into the small space between them, her breath clouding in the cold air and drifting past the fuzzy collar of his coat. The pirates must have heaters in here, to make it just warm enough for her breath to show. Willix tilts his head, his eyes steady on hers. Jyn swallows, meets his gaze. “Don’t wait for me.”

He blinks, startled. The arm around her waist flexes slightly.

Then he sighs, his own breath misting out and mingling with her own, then dissipating into the brightness of the cavern. “Don’t slow down,” he murmurs, because he may not know what she’s up to, but he understands this. She knew he would, somehow. “Don’t look back.”

Jyn nods, her throat too tight to speak anymore, and slips out of his grip.

The edge of the crates is only a few steps away, and when she peers around it, the arguing pirates have moved on. The path is clear. She slinks along the irregular cave wall, aiming for the shadows under a nearby A-wing, stepping softly to the south before angling away towards the less crowded, more shadowed end of the cavern. As she nears, she can see where the Imperial shuttle squats like an angular bird, sharp black wings folded and running lights as dark as dead eyes in a remorseless face.

She doesn’t look back.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Delta T-3c is the type of shuttle Orsen Krennic used, and it was apparently only put into production because Krennic expressed interest in the design and so the company decided to build it. This may or may not be that exact shuttle.


	5. The Payoff

It only takes her about ten minutes to work her way close enough to see the Delta T-3. The pirates have no discernible organization system back here; they’ve mostly just tossed piles of whatever loot they’ve claimed wherever they felt like it, and rifled through them for what they needed. Jyn recognizes a couple half-burnt crates with the _Muunyak_ logo on the side, and feels a brief surge of anger at the bastards who shot her down, killed those two poor haulers just trying to make their way out here in the galaxy, and for all she knows, killed Dalle and Waxna too.

She doesn’t have time for it, though, and anyway, what can she do? Jyn shakes her head and gives the _Muunyak_ crates as wide a berth as she can. Her detour takes her past another pile of crates that are marked with the Imperial hazard symbols for explosives. Seems like the pirates got their hands on a nice stash of grenades. Jyn considers nabbing a few as she walks by, but decides in the end that it’s too high a risk to be worth it. Opening the crates will make noise, and she’s better off staying as quiet as possible until Willix draws the pirates’ attention to the front.

The walls back here are studded with kyber again, big chunks that catch the light and glitter coldly, jewels she cannot reach. She ignores them as best she can, and tries not to touch the walls any more than she must. She’s also careful to keep clear of any loose snow that might crunch under her boots, dodging behind the struts of the A-wings and the piles of loot whenever a voice gets too close. Jyn settles at last into a small shadowed alcove with a clear line of sight to the T-3c, and pulls her coat tight around her body, willing herself to stay still and unnoticeable as she waits. About five meters away, a wiry Human kicks at the closed ramp of the stolen shuttle, their passionate curses muffled by a long patchy scarf wrapped around their face. Next to the pirate, a Z3-NO droid hums in a slightly off-key tone, the cold probably doing their processors no favors. The little droid’s bumpy dome top has been painted in chipped orange, and their various limbs, usually tipped in tools for digging, hydrating, and tending seeds are instead all tipped in pickaxes and ice chippers, and one glowing red-hot heater appendage. Jyn eyes the droid carefully, checking for blood stains or other signs of gore, but if the pirates use this little creature as a torture device, she can’t make out any signs of it. The Z3 simply hovers nearby the cursing pirate, humming off key and occasionally making a distressed sort of beeping noise. The heater limb waves close to the pirate, probably in an attempt to warm them up, but doesn’t otherwise move.

For their part, the pirate ignores the droid, and the distant noises of the hangar, focused wholly on the unyielding shuttle that has clearly frustrated their efforts to plunder it. Jyn thinks the language they are cursing in might be Weequay, but she doesn’t devote a lot of time trying to figure it out. It takes another five minutes or so for the pirate – possibly the captain – to get over their temper tantrum at the un-impressed shuttle’s locked door. They give it one last heavy kick, then storm off towards the front of the cave, muttering as they pass. “Come, Zeno,” they bark at the droid, but don’t wait to see if it follows. The little droid hums loudly in response, but curiously, stays in exactly the same spot, making no move to obey. The pirate glares around their patchy scarf, then throws their hands up and continues stomping angrily towards the bright cave opening. Jyn gathers that this sort of thing probably happens a lot with droids out in these extreme conditions, making them slow to respond or even disabling them. Well, as far as she knows, Z3-NO models don’t have security programs. If the droid makes any noise when Jyn slips up to the hatch with her key code from the Rodians, she can just shoot it and dash for the cockpit.

Jyn waits as the pirate’s muttering fades, and to her mild surprise, she finds herself holding her breath, listening hard towards the front of the cave. But no roar of an A-wing engine echoes back to her, no shouts or shots from the enraged pirates reach her ears. She takes an abortive step towards the shuttle, then huddles back into her hiding spot. Something is off, and she can’t place her finger on it but she’s long ago learned to listen to her gut. Five more minutes pass, then ten, and still, no signs that the officer has made his move, that he’s gone for his escape ship. Perhaps he’s waiting for her, after all, waiting for her to start up a ship of her own and cause enough ruckus that he can escape almost unnoticed. Maybe he turned back and realized that she didn’t go to the south end after all.

Another thought follows close on the heels of that one, so suddenly that Jyn feels lightheaded and has to lean back against the icy wall. The cold of the cave slips down Jyn’s collar and paints her spine with ice. Maybe he got caught. Maybe he’s being held at the front of the cave, maybe the pirates have already slit his throat and left him to bleed out on the icy white ground while she –

Fuck it. The grenades aren’t too far, and there haven’t been any pirates moving around back here for several minutes. She can grab a couple, toss one off to the front, and in the chaos she’ll have time to check for Willix. If he’s just waiting for the right time to grab a ship, he can run for it then and she can get on the shuttle with a clear conscience. If he’s not…

She has to circle around the crates and out of sight of the shuttle to get to the one she needs. The grenade crate opens with an audible creak that makes her wince, the ice formed on the hinges cracking no matter how carefully she tries to brush it off. She doesn’t dare open the damn thing fully, instead snaking her arm in and groping blindly for a few of the grenades inside. _Fool_ , thunders Saw in her memory, _fool to flail blindly in a box of explosives, fool to care for the welfare of an enemy!_

 _Fool to save a woman he knew was up to something_ , Jyn responds coldly in her head. _Fool to waste his resources to save my life. But I’m still here._

Her kyber necklace digs into her throat as she closes her fingers around a smooth grenade.

_He didn’t leave me behind._

And anyway, if he isn’t going to create a distraction for her, then she can just do it on her own. If Jyn knows how to do anything, she knows how to create a little chaos.

Something crashes behind her.

Jyn whirls around, her blaster already in one hand, the grenade cocked back in her other. At first, she sees nothing, and then a pirate shouts from a few meters away, on the other side of the nearest A-Wing. “Stupid boltbag!”

 _Crash!_ Now Jyn can see the edge of a scattered pile of crates skidding wildly across the ice nearby, bits of metal and plastic spraying out amid packing materials and what looks like canned food goods. A round gear rolls under the A-Wing towards her as several more annoyed pirate voices join the first, and Jyn hears again the off-key humming of the Z3 droid, now closer to the A-Wing than before. It takes her a moment to realize that the droid has, for some inexplicable reason, decided to start overturning crates. When she ducks down and peers under the A-Wing, she can see booted feet running towards the orange-painted limbs, then immediately diving back as something glowing red swipes at them.

“Shite, watch out for the burner, lads!” One of the pirates bellows, drowned out almost immediately by a faint sizzling sound and the scream of an organic taking a red-hot poker to the flesh.

Her feet are moving almost before her brain has finished processing the scene, because this is it, this is the distraction she needs, and if she doesn’t take it now she’s kriffed. This has to be Willix, somehow it just has to be, he must have somehow subverted the droid – it’s actions are too deliberate, too well-planned to just be random malfunctioning signals in the droid’s synthetic brain, and the distraction is just too perfectly timed.

So Jyn bolts for the Imperial shuttle, bringing the little control key the Rodians gave her out of her pocket and tapping in the key code as she runs. She skids around the grenade crates in time to see the dark, dead lights of the shuttle suddenly snap on, the faint grey glow of light flare around the edges of the shuttle ramp as it’s hydraulic lines hum and whine in the cold. The ramp starts to drop, and Jyn’s heartbeat thunders in her ears with a combination of triumph and terror, because behind her the irritated shouts at the droid shift abruptly to surprise, confusion, and then a whole new level of anger as the pirates hear the shuttle’s opening and come to look.

She risks one quick glance over her shoulder just before she leaps up the nearly-open ramp, just enough to see the patchy-scarf of the cursing pirate burst into view, trailed by half a dozen shouting (heavily armed) thugs, but they are too far back to grab her and too slow to shoot, she’ll be inside and closed off in just a few more steps and she’s almost made it –

Something hard collides with her shoulder as she spins back – a body – _pirate!_ – she lashes out with an elbow and feels their ribs give but shit, _shit,_ hands on her shoulders yanking her to the side and she loses her balance just as the blasters behind her begin to whine.

 _“Down!”_ barks a voice over her head but it’s too late, her shitty third-rate boots have slipped on the icy ramp, out from under her in her surprise and she can’t control the fall, can’t throw herself flat to avoid the scream of red blaster fire as it races for her heart. She manages to twist, latching on to the pirate in front of her and using him as a fulcrum point to throw herself a little further to the side, but it’s not enough, and the searing heat of a blaster bolt burns across the top of her shoulder. The burn lances down through her skin and muscles so intense that her vision whites out, and despite herself, she screams. She’s a dead woman, she knows it before she hits the cold metal plating of the Imperial shuttle’s floor, she’s off balance under a pirate who looms over her, hands still clamped painfully tight around her upper arms, pinned down, her head throbbing and throbbing around the agonizing pain in her shoulder and she’s _dead!_

“Close it!” Someone bellows in her ear, “Close the door! _”_

She's dragged then, struggling to get her weight balanced over her feet, but he's dragging her roughly upwards, her head throbbing in time to her heartbeat and she can't get balanced, can't get on her feet. More blaster bolts flash by over his head, burning black marks into the grey interior of the T-3c, scattering harsh red light across Willix’s narrow face like shooting stars in the void. “Hale,” he shouts, wrenching her to the side hard enough to make her vision grey out again as the pain lances through her shoulder and up her neck, joining the pounding in her head, churning her guts with nausea. “ _Close the damn door!”_

He drops her, leans aside, aims a blaster out the open shuttle door and fires. Fires at the pirates. Some of the fog in Jyn’s head clears, enough to recognize that she’s somehow now huddled inside the open ramp of the Imperial shuttle, her back to the cold metal, the control key cutting through her gloved hand, a grenade still clenched in the other hand, and Willix standing in front of her, his body practically crushing her against the bulkhead as he fires at the pirates outside. The pirates who are growing increasingly closer, and louder.

Jyn breathes in.

She whips her arms up and shoves Willix back, sending him stumbling towards the cockpit of the ship. In the same smooth motion, she spins around, flicking the grenade’s primer with her thumb just as she launches it out into the frozen cave. She has time to see the nearest pirate look up, time to see him register the little blinking red light as it sails right into the middle of the oncoming storm of blasters and knives and death by pirate. Then Jyn’s momentum carries her to the other side of the opening, and she spins away from the bright white of the cave, slapping the control key against the ramp controls on the bulkhead. The ramp begins to whine closed, the protest of cold hydraulics drowned by the warning screams of the pirates outside – who are in turn cut off abruptly by the resounding _boom_ of an Imperial concussion grenade detonating in their midst. The shuttle rocks slightly from the shockwave and Jyn scrambles to stay upright, except it rocks again, the other way, just as the door snaps shut and seals with a hiss. It rocks again, gods damn it, the hard uninviting deck plating trying so hard to claim her.

Wait, no, not rocking - launching! Jyn lunges forward, staggering and fighting the bile rising in her throat as ahead of her, Willix flips another switch, pulls back the yoke of the shuttle as smoothly as if he’s done it all his life. Out the front viewscreen, red blaster fire cuts the white cave light to pieces, but the shielding on these T-3s is expensive for a reason so the bolts simply shatter off at odd angles, striking the ice and sending small showers of glittering white down on the ship as it moves relentlessly for the large cave opening.

Jyn drags herself into the copilot seat and clutches the arms, her head too heavy to lift all the way, her guts rebelling, her vision blurring and shifting around the edges. The tight grip sends another knife of burning pain through her shoulder and neck, her head throbs and throbs, but she grits her teeth and breathes through it. She will not throw up. She will not pass out.

She can’t.

The icy walls begin to move faster around them as Willix throws the throttle forward, the kyber lights inside the walls glitter and shine out, tiny beacons of piercing light stabbing into Jyn’s aching head and whispering, whispering, _everything I do, my stardust_ blurring with _they have a child!_ and overridden by a roaring _death takes the slow!_ She breathes through it, pushing away the terror, pushing away the pain in her head and the cold in her fingers, the whipping feel of long grass at her ankles as she runs and runs and runs from the home that burns behind her. A crackling voice at her elbow snaps to life, _unidentified vessel, slow your engines and submit to boarding_ , and Jyn closes her eyes and breathes through it, because her worst nightmare has come true and she is helpless to stand against the Empire as it crashes through the shuttle door. A different voice, crisp and clean and as Imperial as anything she’s ever heard snaps from her side, _negative, authorization code eight-eight-four-dorn-senth-five._

 _Code accepted. Apologies, Commander, and please have a safe trip_ the crackling voice replies and stops, but the fear remains. Jyn breathes through it.

 _Trust the Force, Jyn_ , her mother murmurs, hands cracked with cold and nails caked with dark earth and bits of stone but gentle even so, touching her shoulder, her neck, her cheek. _Learn to look without fear, my stardust. Open your eyes and see without_

 _Open your eyes,_ he commands, _open your eyes, Hale, let me see if your head injury has_

Pain shoots through her injured shoulder again, sharp as a knife, white hot, burning, and she flinches and pushes away from it, bitter because she’s so cold, so cold, but the heat is too much and she will shatter from the dichotomy, torn apart by the war between her frozen body and her burning shoulder, her burning head.

 _Stardust_ , her father murmurs, or doesn’t, it’s hard to hear him over the pounding in her head, over the voices muttering her ear. Papa pulls her from her chair and hugs her tight, lays her on the floor, cursing in a tongue she doesn’t understand. In her ear, a tinny electronic voice interrupts with a painful wobble, _if you are to death here than please I cannot forgive please retain a holding please stay just stay_

The crystal around her neck is so cold that it burns.

There are people standing over her, looking down at her, their faces strange and unfamiliar as they watch her over the dark head of the man she knows and doesn’t know. People with shining swords in hand watch as she burns and freezes in turns, her head throbbing, throbbing, throbbing in time to her heart. _There was no place more sacred to us_ , they whisper. _There was no place that grieved us so much_. Their faces blur and shift and fall away, farther away, back to their cold graves, their lost stars shining in dark ice, but now other faces peer down at her, faces of people she knew, people she knows. People who hate her. People who love her. Loved her. If they ever really did love her. _I’m sure they did_ , says the man with the sad eyes. _I’m sure they did_

 _But they never stayed_ , she argues, or cries, or whispers _. They never stayed they never_

 _They must have wanted to_ , he argues, or cries, or whispers back. _They must only have left you to protect you_

 _Everything I do, I do to protect you,_ Papa says, face soft and sad as he hugs her tight and sets her aside.

 _Learn to look without fear_ , Mama says, arms crossed in that no-nonsense way of hers, the kyber at her throat burning.

 _I don’t want to be protected_ , Jyn tells them both. _I would rather fight_ with _you than be left._

 _I believe you,_ says the man. _I believe you_ , echoes the boy standing over his shoulder, a rock in his hand and blood on his small dark face.

 _Stay_ , she begs, orders, asks over the throbbing in her head. Something cold presses against the red hot welt behind her ear, the pain flaring up as the needle hisses softly, and then cold floods her senses again, the darkness swells up, and as Jyn drops down into it, she thinks she hears a distant, quiet voice -

 _I will_.

 

* * *

 

Jyn’s first thought is, of course, _fuck you, Ilum_.

Her second is a long, internal groan as she slowly comes back to full awareness and takes stock of a seemingly endless list of aches, pains, and lingering chills in her various limbs. Her head still feels heavy and oddly fragile on her neck, but the throbbing has subsided at least. Her fingers and toes are still cold, a faint chill pebbling her skin and making her shiver slightly, but she’s not longer freezing to death on the floor.

In fact, she doesn’t seem to be on a floor at all.

Jyn forces her eyes open and squints into the dim light of the shuttle.

She’s…on a bunk? A fold out bunk, extended out from the bulkhead and padded with some chemical-smelling kind of material. She places the scent a moment later – medical-grade antibacterial treated cloth, the kind used on high-end hospital beds. By her shoulder, a vitals monitor beeps softly, in time with her heartbeat. A kit is opened on the wall, bacta and a few syringes missing from their designated spots. Some sort of vaguely glowing machine hangs from a movable bar over her head.

Medical station. The T-3c apparently has an expensive medical station embedded in the back, and that thing over her head is a very expensive machine designed for internal medical procedures. She’s heard of them, because apparently they don’t even require the user to be particularly well trained in medicine, they just have to follow the instructions on the screen and let the machine do the rest. They also use extremely expensive and specific energy packs, making them far too luxurious for most of the galaxy.

This one appears to be completely expended, it’s lights only kept on by it’s connection to the ship, but otherwise rendered useless until new energy packs are restored.

Jyn notes this with only mild interest, the majority of her attention snapping very quickly to the metal binder anchoring her wrist to a giant nearby crate.

There are a dozen or so crates packed into the back of the shuttle, big, heavy metallic crates with reinforced frames. They are stacked so that they block off most of the hold area of the shuttle and make it impossible to see the cockpit from where she’s stretched out, even though she knows it can’t be too far from her. _He_ can’t be too far. When she holds her breath and listens hard, she can just make out the soft sound of a muffled voice. It sounds like it’s coming from over the comm line, and after a moment, there’s a brief response from the man in the ship. Willix, answering a query from someone he respects, or obeys, or…

Willix is probably not actually his name.

He saved her life. Spent a lot of expensive medical shite to do it, too.

He chained her to a kriffing crate.

Well.

 _That_ , at least, she knows how to handle.

The binder is an older Feral X-2 model, used by law enforcement in certain Outer Rim sectors where the governments are generally too cheap to buy the expensive newer models. It has a simple circuit in the center of the cuffs that keeps them closed tight with a continuous low-grade electric current, but only a nominal metal covering protecting that circuit. The heavy crate she’s bound to has a larger, more complicated lock, but – Jyn moves carefully, mindful both of her aching head and the beeping vitals monitor still attached by a wireless node to her pulse. She keeps her breathing steady and slow to keep the monitor from sounding a medical alert, and her movements deliberate and controlled to keep the dizziness to a minimum, and leans off the edge of the medical bed to peer underneath the bottom of the crate lock. Hah, just as she thought, the power source for the lock is right there, tucked underneath the lock itself and barely protected from a good, sharp lockpick. Jyn reaches up for her head to pull her lockpick from her bun, then freezes for a moment as she feels her tangled hair hanging loose around her face. He took her hair down! Before she can feel more than a brief flash of panic and reflexive anger, she catches sight of the metallic gleam on the shelf under the monitor’s screen. Her lockpick, her gloves, and her vibroblade sit on the shelf, lined up neatly as if waiting for her.

No blaster, she notes, but he left the knife? Weird.

The cheap cover to the cuffs pops off with a casual flick of her lockpick, and then the pick makes for an excellent conductor between the crate’s power pack and the circuit holding the cuffs together. The tiny jolt of power that races between the crate and the cuffs shorts out the circuit board in half a second, and Jyn has to move quick to catch the pick and the cuffs before they clatter to the metal deck. The abrupt movement twinges her arm and neck, and Jyn inhales in sharp surprise as she remembers the horrible pain of being shot through the shoulder. She sits up carefully, still mindful of the vitals monitor beeping away, and pulls her torn, burnt shirt aside to inspect the damage.

The blaster wounds are still there on either side of her shoulder, and swollen red around the edges, but someone has used a lot of bacta and…and a stitcher, closing up what otherwise would have been an ugly, possibly fatal wound.

A stitcher is barely less expensive than bacta.

Jyn swallows, licks her dry lips, and then reaches for the vitals monitor. She’ll have to slice into the code of the machine itself to keep the beeping continuous even after she pulls off the node on her neck. It takes her a solid five minutes or so, because her head still hurts and the program is unfamiliar – she hasn’t had to do something like this in a long, long time, after all – but she manages to trick the machine into thinking it’s still attached to a healthy organic vital system in the end. She peels the node off her pulse and sets it on the shelf, picking up her gear and (gently) winding her hair back into a bun.

The comm call has ended by the time she creeps around the edge of the crates and sees Willix (no, not Willix, Willix is clearly a lie) sitting in the cockpit with his back to her, typing on a datapad as the racing lights of hyperspace glint in his dark hair.

Jyn steps out from around the crates and puts her hands on her hips. “Hi,” she says calmly.

He bolts up, the datapad clattering to the deck. Jyn would laugh at the startled look on his face, except she’s too busy rushing forward. She slams into him before he’s even fully on his feet, digging her hands into his shirt (not an Imperial jacket, this time a faded blue workman’s shirt worn soft from use) and shoving him hard against the flight console.

To his credit, he recovers almost immediately, even with his back still bent awkwardly against the console. “What do you remember?” he asks before she can speak further, his dark eyes searching her face.

He thinks she’s still addled from the head injury. Jyn glares at him, and leans in close, pulling him up a little by his shirt. “You knocked me over and got me shot,” she says flatly. “I threw a grenade. We ran for it.”

He winces. “I saw the ramp open, but not who had opened it,” he confesses. “When you came around the corner, I thought you were a pirate trying to go rogue and steal the ship from the captain, so I tried to throw you off the ramp and get past you. I’m…” he shakes his head, “sorry.”

Jyn snorts, not because she doesn’t believe him, but because she does. “I thought you were a pirate too. That’s why I, you know,” she doesn’t let go of his shirt, but she leans on one elbow and presses it against his ribs. He winces again, this time in mild pain, and nods.

“That was a good shot,” he tells her, a touch ruefully. “Cracked the rib. Had to use my last bone stabilizer.”

There had been almost five slots for bone stabilizers in the little medical bay behind the crates. If he’d only needed one for himself…

She doesn’t know how she feels about that.

“You’re not an Imperial mapmaker,” she says firmly, because at least that’s a truth she can wrap her head around.

“No,” he agrees calmly. “And you’re not a cargo hauler.”

It’s on the tip of her tongue to ask. _So who are you, then? Why did you heal me? Why didn’t you just kriffing space me once you were away from Ilum?_

His eyes are half-shut, his body deceptively relaxed against her grip, his left hand down and out of her line of sight –

Shit. He’s probably got a blaster trained on her, doesn’t he?

Jyn sighs. “How did we clear the Destroyers?”

He shrugs, his shirt pulling at her hands as he does. “Imperial Commander Benjamin Turnell has a special projects clearance code that permits him to refuse boarding from anyone below the rank of Vice Admiral. The highest ranking official in Ilum space right now is a Commodore.”

“Is he real?” Jyn asks, letting her grip slack, stepping slowly back. She keeps her gaze on his, though she’s not surprised to see him tucking a blaster back into his belt out of the corner of her eye. “Turnell,” she repeats, not sure why she feels the need to push but not willing to stop. “Is he real?”

He tugs his shirt back into order a touch fussily and shrugs again. “As real as any of them.”

Something in his eyes bothers her when he says it – too calm, too detached. Not quite as cold as Imperial Lieutenant Willix in the ice caves of Ilum…but still. There’s a touch of vitriol in his voice, an edge of cold that feels like it might be directed at himself as much as it is at her.

It bothers her, and it shouldn’t.

"Commander Turnell also rates full access to local databases," he continues, picking his way carefully through the words, apparently unsure of where they now stand. "Such as medical bay reports."

"Waxna," Jyn says quickly, her throat tightening suddenly. "Siever."

"They made it," he says softly, and then a hint of a smile tugs at his mouth. "The reports actually recommend an official reprimand to Captain Siever, because apparently her niece 'acted with aggressive lack of decorum' after a medical tech in the mining base infirmary failed to react to the seriousness of the patient's injuries."

Typical Imperial banthashit, putting the non-Human at a low priority. That Siever pitched a fit about it warms Jyn a bit more than really makes sense. She barely knew either of them, after all, and it isn't like she can help anyway. Still... "How aggressive?"

"She picked the tech up by the neck and threw him into the snow outside." He is definitely smiling a little now, his eyes shining with humor. Its...a good look on him. "I deleted the request for reprimand," he goes on before Jyn can recover from the hint of a dimple on his cheek. "So long as she doesn't assault anyone else on the base, I imagine they'll be fine."

Jyn nods, and forces herself to look away from his face. Breathe in. Breathe out. It's not over yet. One last hurdle to cross.

“I don’t know what you are,” she lies (because she knows what to call a man who hops between names and ranks, who steals from the Empire while wearing their clothes, and it’s not a word she dares to say aloud, not while he has a blaster). “But I was hired to get this ship’s cargo to someone, and I plan to deliver.”

His eyes narrow, and his hand twitches, but he doesn’t pull the blaster again. Smart man – she's close enough to stab him through the throat long before he pulls that weapon clear and fires. Jyn deliberately looks down at his hand, then back at his face, challenging. It's no good pretending like they aren’t about to get in each other’s way, and she can’t afford to _not_ deliver this cargo. The Rodians are too rich, judging by the price they offered her in the first place. They will probably hire bounty hunters to chase her down if she stiffs them on this valuable cargo, this valuable ship. At the least, she will lose a lot of credits that she _needs_ to get through the next couple months, and probably to get another job after this.

“Your employer,” he says slowly, as if he’s working through it, looking for the answer that will let them both walk away from this problem satisfied. “How did they know this ship even existed? It was hidden in that cave only a week or so ago, by some very discreet people.”

Jyn shrugs, because how the hells should she know? That’s definitely the kind of information that would get her killed, if she poked at it too hard.

“They paid me to get it,” she says at last when he doesn’t seem inclined to ask any more questions. “They’ll pay me the rest to bring it in.”

“Do you even know what it is?”

She shrugs again. Doesn’t matter.

“I’m sorry,” he says heavily. “I have to deliver this shuttle and it’s cargo. Too many…” he pauses, watches her shift her weight onto the balls of her feet, her hand drifting to her vibroblade handle, and then with an air of a man speaking more to himself than to her, he finishes, “too many lives hang in the balance.”

Jyn pauses, vibroblade pressing against her hip, her heart already accelerating and her nerves flashing alive with the anticipation of a fight. “What?”

He looks up at her again, his face resigned, his hand resting on the hilt of his blaster, ready to pull it out and fire at her, ready to fight and kill and maybe die for this ship. “Millions of Rodian lives depend on this ship reaching the right people,” he tells her almost reluctantly, like he can’t quite believe the words are coming out of his mouth. “I can’t let you take it. I’m sorry.”

“Rodians.”

“Yes.”

Jyn drops to her heels and crosses her arms. Across from her, he blinks, the startled look from before creeping back around the edges of his expression as he notes her sudden complete lack of aggression. She almost grins at him, because catching him off guard is honestly a little fun. “Rodians,” she says. “A big grouchy green guy, and a smaller blue female, kind of twitchy, likes big flowy red robes?”

She smirks as she watches the naked astonishment on his face for several seconds, before he gets a grip and wipes it away.  “Your employer,” he says at last, raising an eyebrow at her and ignoring her amusement. “Did they leave you a…means of contact?”

Jyn holds up the control key that opened the ship between two fingers, then flips it to reveal the comms code etched into the back.

Grimly, he steps aside and gestures to the comm panel. Jyn slinks between him and the console, fighting hard to keep her face amused and unaffected when he doesn’t step back to make room. She dials in the code without once looking at the warm point where his chest brushes against her arm, because she is a grown and mature fighter and slicer, and not some blushing sweetheart from a Core world holo. It takes her two tries to dial in the code properly, because the buttons on this stupid comm are tiny and not at all because her fingers suddenly feel clumsy and unresponsive.

He reaches past her elbow and taps in a secondary code almost as soon as her fingers leave the pad, too fast for her to read the numbers.

The screen runs through a complex series of codes that she could untangle if she were inclined, but she doesn’t bother. She doesn’t shift to the side either. He’s got to only be doing this, standing this close, watching her with that focused intensity, to get some kind of rise out of her. This is payback for laughing at his surprise, and she’s not going to move back and let him know it worked. She’s not going to let him win.

She’s certainly not going to admit, even to herself, that she kind of wants to shift closer, lean against him and see if he reaches up and pulls her in. See if he’s just as comfortable now as he was in the little nest of blankets in the Ilum caves.

The screen beeps and clears, and a blue face appears in the grainy feed.

“Captain,” says the Rodian that Jyn knows as Gola, and then her deep blue eyes widen and her antennae swivel to stand straight up.  “You!”

“Hey,” Jyn replies flatly.

“Hello, Laari,” he says genially. “It seems we have a case of, how do your people like to say it? Left antenna not talking to the right?”

The Rodian makes a grating noise that Jyn interprets as an embarrassed cough. “Am I to understand, sir, that you have recovered the package?”

“Our department promised you that we would,” he replies in a much less friendly tone. “But you hired a contractor anyway.”

“It was taking so long, Captain,” the Rodian murmurs, spreading her hands wide, her antennae drooping low. “And so much depends on it. My people, my home - ”

“We will be at the drop point in three to five hours,” he cuts her off. “You will transfer your promised payment to the contractor, and then initiate standard pick up procedures.”

“You’ll report this to your leadership, won’t you,” the Rodian sighs, her antennae somehow hanging even lower.

“I’m sorry, Laari, but I have to.” There’s a note of sympathy in his voice now. “Relax, he won’t punish you for it. Although in the future, I hope you have a little more faith in the chain of command, my friend.”

“It is…difficult, in these dark days, Captain.” The Rodian shakes her head, and folds her hands back into her robe. “But I will strive to be better. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Jyn says graciously, and cuts the feed.

At her side, the ‘captain’ rubs a hand over his face, a move that does nothing to hide the smile tugging at the corners of his lips.

“We’ll be on Ord Mantell in less than an hour,” he says after a moment, dropping his hand. “You should have your payment before then. Laari will want to be clear of any reminders of this mistake as soon as possible.”

“You said three to five hours,” Jyn reminds him, although she’s pretty sure she already knows why.

“I don’t plan to hang around while they make the pickup,” he confirms it. “I’ll need a little time to get clear, get off planet.”

She shouldn’t say it; it’s dangerous to say it out loud, to name him for what he clearly is. “You mean in case any Imperials show up,” she says instead. She can still feel the pull of the mostly-healed wound on her shoulder, and there’s a lingering warmth in her skin where his arms had wrapped around her and pulled her in close against the cold.

He swallows, and she’s close enough to see his throat move, to see his pulse flutter faster.

“Yes,” he replies at last. “In case any Imperials show up.”

“Good plan,” she agrees, and because he hasn’t reached for the blaster, because he saved her life when it would have been safer to kill her, because he’s watching her with those damn dark eyes, Jyn reaches out and slips her fingers into his hand.

He lets her pull his hand up between them, watches with half-closed, guarded eyes as she cocks an eyebrow at him in challenge. But when she presses her lips very softly to his fingertips, the mask splinters – he takes a deep, shaky breath and lifts his other hand, brushing the shell of her ear so delicately she can just barely feel it.

“You could,” he starts, stops.

She can’t, and they both know it, but she…she wants to hear it, anyway. She wants to know, just for a moment, what it feels like to be asked. To be wanted. “Yeah?”

“You are extraordinarily talented,” he says, his voice steadying a little as he watches her. “I couldn’t find a single hole in your records on the _Muunyak_.”

Jyn presses her lips against his fingertips again, watching with interest as a reddish flush spreads up from his collar. He doesn’t seem like a man given to blushing, which is probably why he's so caught off-balance. She likes that more than she really should.

“You fought armed pirates with your bare hands,” he continues, speaking quicker now, his eyes fixed on hers with a dogged determination. “When you were injured and disoriented from a shuttle crash, you still got us both out. And the Talz, you got the Talz... Your survival knowledge in the caves was - was extensive. Impressive.”

“Thanks,” she says dryly. “You did okay, too.”

He laughs, a choked, uncertain sound that seems to surprise him, and then shakes his head. “That’s not what I’m…” His eyes flick down to where she has gently curled his fingers around hers, her lips still pressed to his calloused knuckles.

“Ask me,” Jyn murmurs against his skin, and smiles when he shivers. It feels fair, somehow. She can still remember what it felt like when he was tangled around her, his breath in her hair. She can still remember the gentleness of his hands in her hair.

“You hate the Empire,” he starts, “you know how to fight.”

She shakes her head. “No,” she chides him, because this is what she meant and he knows it. He's dodging, trying to dodge, so Jyn kisses the soft skin between his knuckles, watching his tongue flick out across his lower lip in what is probably an unconscious reaction. “Ask me.”

“Come with me,” he says in a low, rough voice that goes straight through her chest. "Come with me."

Jyn lets herself enjoy it for a brief moment, lets herself feel the weight of his hand in hers.

Then she lifts her head. “What’s your name?”

And he hesitates, his fingers curling around hers, his eyes dark. He opens his mouth, closes it again.

“Millions of lives,” she repeats softly. She leans her head down and kisses his palm, because she understands. She couldn’t answer that question, either, and she doesn’t even have the excuse of cities’ worth of lives hanging in the balance. Only her own life, tiny and insignificant and all she has left in the galaxy.

She drops his hand and steps around him, back towards the crates. He doesn’t reach for her again.

They spend the next hour in silence, although it’s not a bitter silence like she half-expects. It’s…just quiet. Tired, perhaps. Resigned. He looks back at her once after he settles into the pilot’s chair again, marking where she sits on the crates behind him. But he doesn’t look after that, doesn’t make any attempt to ensure that she doesn’t peek in the crates. Maybe he knows that she doesn't care, that the contents don't and can't matter to her. Millions of lives, he said, and she believes him. He must know she believes him. Or maybe he just doesn't want to know if she doesn't.

Jyn folds her legs under her body and sharpens her vibroblade for a few minutes, and then slices easily into the console embedded in the bulkhead of the shuttle. It’s blank, the shuttle either wiped clean before it was hidden in the caves or else the ship is just that new, nothing loaded in yet. The console does, however, have a good enough holonet connection that she can check her temp account set up with the Rodians. Her payment is there, in full, with a small bonus for “discretion.” Jyn shuffles the payment through a dozen shell accounts until she gets it somewhere she can access it on Ord Mantell.

She spends the rest of the time watching him calculate hyperspace formulas before he simply sits back in the pilot chair and closes his eyes. He probably knows she’s looking at him, but he makes no protest, so Jyn allows herself to study his face, to follow the long lines of his throat, to mark the pattern of scruffy dark hair now growing well outside the confines of the neat Imperial goatee, to memorize the faint lines around his eyes.

All too soon, the console beeps, and he opens his eyes and sits up, reaching for the hyperspace throttle.

Jyn drops off the crate and saunters into the copilot chair, sliding into the fitted seat just as the shuttle drops out of hyperspace over…yes, that’s definitely Ord Mantell down there. She didn’t really doubt it, but it’s nice to see the confirmation. Nice to know that he was honest with her about this much. As much as he could dare. More than she has the right to expect.

He lands them swiftly and efficiently at a port in the southern hemisphere, just as the sun is rising in this part of the planet. He feeds the planet traffic control authorities some banthashit story about being a contracted Imperial transport agency dropping off a new shuttle for pick up by the local Fleet. His Mid Rim accent thickens as he speaks, until it’s almost unrecognizable, and she knows the recordings of this conversation won’t be traceable back to him. He speaks so confidently that it’s hard to doubt his story, and he answers the controller’s questions so smoothly that if she hadn’t lived through the last couple of days with him, Jyn figures even she would be fooled.

“Impressive,” she murmurs when he gets immediate permission to set down in a private landing pad where no one will see either of them slip out and away.

“Thank you,” he half-smiles at her, although he can’t quite meet her eyes.

They don’t speak until the ship is settled, until the ramp whines open again (although the hydraulics sound significantly better here in a much more livable _, sane_ temperature). They stand quietly in the open ramp and look out at the bustling wharf, the distant city traffic criss-crossing through the sky. Jyn takes a deep breath of the warm duracrete- and steel-saturated air, watches the sun breaking through the smog-covered horizon.

“Priya,” he says at her side.

“Not my name.”

“I know.” He turns to face her, and lifts his hand, pushing her hair back behind her ear and running a light fingertip across the spot where her head no longer aches but still feels a little tender. She tilts her head to the side and lets him feel the newly healed skin, the lack of swelling and blood. She watches as he looks at her shoulder, her throat, then finally back to her eyes.

“I hope you make it,” she blurts out, because it’s true. Because it’s all she can offer him.

“I probably will,” he shrugs, letting his hand drop. “I have solid alibis on this planet, and contacts in this sector who owe me at least a ride to my next station. But thank you for your conc-“

Jyn steps closer and rises up on her tiptoes, pressing her lips to the corner of his mouth. He cuts off abruptly, freezing in place, his breath catching audibly under the noise of the dock.

“I hope you make it,” Jyn repeats against his cheek, and drops back to the balls of her feet.

He doesn’t speak, but she can see the question in his eyes, and suddenly she knows that if he asks again, if he holds out his hand and asks her one more time, she will do it. She will go with him.

She can’t go with him. She can’t even give him her name. He can’t give her his.

So Jyn turns on her heel and marches down the ramp, out into the port crowd, out into the rising sunlight. She doesn’t look back.

And yet, oddly, she feels buoyant, cheerful, warm for the first time in days and hopeful for the first time in…she’s not sure. But the weather is fine, she’s got credits in her pockets (and in her right boot, and a carefully hidden compartment in her shirt, and a few other places because life is unpredictable and Jyn isn’t stupid). There’s a cantina nearby where a smuggler she’s worked with before hangs out, and if she’s not mistaken, that’s his crappy ship in the docks over there. If she’s lucky, that’s a new job lined up and already waiting.

It is, she decides, going to be a good day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I just write an entire story where Cassian's name is never written? Why, yes, I did. How about that.
> 
> I really hope this hit all the spots for your Christmas prompt, incognitajones!


End file.
